History of England 1-6

The battle took on familiar lines. The NUM refused to hold a national strike ballot and the Nottinghamshire miners carried on working. They belonged to another union and proved to be Thatcher’s inadvertent and even unwilling allies – she could claim that it was miner against miner. Moreover, having learned from her predecessors’ mistakes, she had enough coal to withstand any strike. At the so-called ‘Battle of Orgreave’, mounted police dispersed the flying pickets on which Scargill had placed such hopes. The nation watched and concluded that this was a barren cause, which brought out the worst in everyone. The strike ended on 13 March 1985, though the majority of miners had returned to work long before that. The banners of the unions flew in the breeze and brass bands played as men rejoined the ranks of those they had termed ‘scabs’. Although it was not seen as a defeat, it presaged one. The Nottinghamshire miners, to whom Thatcher had sent her thanks in writing, were to lose everything they had fought for under her successor. A Conservative government would still eventually close their pits.

She went back to the first principles of privatization. Her chancellor, Nigel Lawson, had written to her in 1983 warning that the new life of the private companies would impinge upon ‘the giant utilities and unprofitable companies’, but nothing could stop her now. Twenty-three enterprises, including the British Gas Corporation, British Telecom and the National Coal Board, were up for sale. Half of the shares of British Telecom were put on sale in November 1984 at a low price, which rose by 43 pence on the first day and never dipped. For the first time in its history, the stock exchange seemed a benevolent institution, and it spread a sparkle over the late period of capitalism that socialists could not overcome. In effect it changed the whole attitude of the country: private and public wealth now went hand in hand. The first mobile telephone sets were sold, and the proportion of homes that were owner-occupied rose from 55 per cent to 67 per cent. It was an extraordinary metamorphosis, though it went largely unnoticed at the time. But on 27 October 1986, the fissures of the financial volcano merged and created a mighty explosion which became known as the ‘Big Bang’.

53

The Brighton blast

On 12 October 1984, the Conservative party was to hold its conference at the Grand Hotel in Brighton. In the early hours of the morning, Norman Tebbit noticed the chandelier above his head swaying. Within seconds, the ceiling began to collapse. Tebbit sensed the cause in a moment. The building had been bombed. He survived, though his wife, Margaret, was left paralysed from the neck down. In later years, he would remember the friendly grip of Fred, a fireman, pulling him through the rubble and to safety.

The IRA’s principal target also survived, though her bathroom was wrecked. Five people were killed in the blast, among them the wife of the chief whip, John Wakeham. After she had visited the survivors and comforted the staff, Mrs Thatcher and her husband retired to bed for a few hours. ‘We said a prayer and tried to go to sleep,’ she recalled. Daybreak brought two urgent questions. The first was whether the delegates should immediately return to Westminster. But though shaken and sleepless, Thatcher was unmoved. ‘The conference will go on as usual,’ she told the press, pale-faced and wary-eyed. A second question now arose: given that most of the bedrooms in the hotel were now crime scenes, what were the delegates, still in pyjamas and nightgowns, to wear to the conference? Marks & Spencer were prevailed upon to open their doors at 8 a.m. And so, with all immaculately dressed, the conference started at 9.30 ‘precisely’, as Thatcher was quick to point out. She had proved yet again that she could be neither cowed nor deflected, and the nation took note.

‘We do not surrender to bullets or bombs,’ Thatcher had proclaimed in 1983. If she had, it would have been no wonder. The IRA had been intensifying its campaign, pressing ever harder on the nerve of British fears. Two members of the Irish security forces had been killed; a Unionist politician had been assassinated; and Harrods, the symbol of all that was affluent on the mainland, was targeted. Six people died. The IRA’s campaign had intensified since the late Seventies. In 1976, in the aftermath of bombings in Guildford and Birmingham, the Labour government had withdrawn political status from those convicted of terrorist offences, a policy that Thatcher continued. ‘There can be no question of granting political status,’ she said. ‘A crime is a crime is a crime.’ The IRA was only the most famous, and not always the most brutal, of the terrorist groups in the Province, but if every atrocity was presumed to be the work of the IRA, then it had only itself to blame. Moral considerations aside, the political folly of taking ‘the war’ to the British mainland should have been apparent to its high command. But the IRA was still riding high on the deaths of the hunger strikers in 1981, a cause which gained it yet more funds from the United States. With the Brighton bombing, however, direct attempts on the life of the premier ended. ‘Today we have been unlucky, but remember, we have only to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always,’ the IRA offered. But it was bluster.

The bombing had occurred in the midst of negotiations with the Irish Republic. While it was generally agreed that nothing should divert this process, Thatcher was in no humour for what she called ‘appeasement’. Her Irish counterpart, Garret FitzGerald, was a genial, well-meaning man, but he too had the sensibilities of his people to consider. Time and again, Thatcher ruled out any talk of an executive, or even consultative, role for the Republic in the affairs of the Province. The truth was that she understood little of Ireland or of its history. On one occasion she wondered aloud whether the Catholics might not be better off moving to the Republic. Hadn’t that been done before? Yes, but under Cromwell, it was pointed out. The Unionists, moreover, were largely excluded from the process, a fact that the Reverend Ian Paisley was not slow to allude to.

But still the process continued, until on 15 November 1985 the Anglo-Irish Agreement was signed. The concessions now appear cosmetic; at the time they were radical. The Irish were given their cherished ‘consultative role’ in the Province, while accepting that there could be no change to its constitution unless the majority of the population should desire one. That possibility seemed remote to the British, but less so to their Irish counterparts, who knew that the demographics of the Province had begun to tilt towards such an eventuality.

While Thatcher evinced little concern for the Province, her opposite number in Washington cared a great deal. Ronald Reagan had been the chief spur to the Anglo-Irish Agreement. The two politicians were very different beasts. Reagan had won his position by conjoining an easy, unaffected charm and an equally easy patriotism, but a keen intellect was not his distinctive trait. In later years, when asked why she had held in such high esteem a man whom she would never have appointed to her cabinet, Thatcher replied: ‘Because Ron has an instinctive understanding of the greatness and destiny of America.’ As cold warriors, they were popularly supposed to be inseparable, but here their approaches differed. For Thatcher, the West’s nuclear deterrent was an indispensable guarantor of both freedom and peace. Had not the doctrine of mutually assured destruction kept the great Bear in his cage? For Reagan, nuclear missiles were at best a necessary evil. He was heard to exclaim at meetings, ‘Why don’t we just abolish nuclear weapons?’

Many asked the same question. One of the most effective of the anti-nuclear protests came from a group that became known as ‘the women of Greenham Common’, who combined the recently rediscovered authority of their sex with a fierce antagonism to nuclear weaponry. Their protest arose from the arrival in England of American cruise missiles; these were stationed at RAF Greenham Common, in Berkshire, which became the focus of mass demonstration when in 1982 the women set up an extended camp, intending to remain as long as the rockets stayed in position. On 1 April 1983, the women formed a human chain around the site, which caught the world’s imagination. The camp settled into something like a mini city, with different quarters for different groups. It was a long wait, of some nineteen years, and the camp was not disbanded until 2000. In the end, the missiles were removed from Greenham Common as the result of a nuclear treaty between the United States and the then Soviet Union, but the women refused to leave until a memorial for their achievement was set up. Had they succeeded? In any direct sense, the answer must be no. But they set a new, strange and deeply English example of peaceful rejection of power.

It was Thatcher who first struck a mattock into the ice of the Cold War. In February 1984, Yuri Andropov, the ageing premier of the USSR, died. Thatcher attended his funeral, where she impressed the Politburo and the Russian people with her dignity and courtesy. She also formed a new acquaintance, one Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, a man, as she said, ‘she could do business with’. It helped that Gorbachev had defied precedent by bringing his wife. Konstantin Chernenko succeeded Andropov only to follow him into the grave, and Gorbachev was appointed in his place. The empire he had inherited was vast in scope but sick with senescence. Its economy was doubly vulnerable: firstly, oil and gas accounted for half its exports. Secondly, in order to keep pace with the United States, it was obliged to spend a vast percentage of its GDP on defence. These disadvantages might have counted for less had its once legendary technological initiative not atrophied since the Sixties. In sum, having run out of ideas, the USSR was beginning to run out of money and will.

The Special Defence Initiative, better known by the sobriquet ‘Star Wars’, was Reagan’s suggestion as to how the Cold War impasse might be broken. The intention was to spend over a trillion dollars on a satellite system that would effectively end the possibility of conventional nuclear conflict. When the subject was raised during talks over the future of mid-range nuclear weapons, it became crushingly clear that the USSR could never match such an innovation. Thus began the end of the Cold War and, ultimately, the dissolution of what Reagan had once called the ‘Evil Empire’. SDI ended its days in 1993, stillborn. It was perhaps the greatest bluff in history, and a bluff all the more remarkable for being inadvertent.

The contribution of Britain to the end of the Cold War may easily be exaggerated. Neither the women of Greenham Common nor Thatcher herself were to lift that swaying sword from its hook, but it was Thatcher who made the first overtures to the eastern bloc. For all his personal warmth and evident goodwill, Reagan was seen as Thatcher’s charming guide, a guru without innate authority for the role. The enduring image of him was that captured by a new British television comedy: he was shown as hardly ever leaving his bed, his face either twisted in consternation or alight with a brainless smile. The president, along with every politician, actor, singer, celebrity, churchman, member of parliament and member of the royal family, was a latex puppet. Spitting Image not only lampooned the coarseness, cynicism and vulgarity of the time – in many minds it embodied it.

The puppeteers responsible were Peter Fluck and Roger Law. They mischievously altered their names to ‘Luck’ and ‘Flaw’ in the concluding credits, although alternative malapropisms had no doubt occurred to them. The humour was not so much a rifle as a blunderbuss, with shot flying everywhere and everyone wounded. If the Tory cabinet was presented as a court of nervous sycophants led by a dictator, the Labour party appeared as a crew of unelectable clowns. The voice artist captured perfectly the prime minister’s laboured mellifluousness, but also let her lapse into a Lincolnshire growl when crossed. However inspired its puppets or its jokes, the show could never be accused of delicacy. The puppeteers confuted their critics with an unanswerable observation. ‘People say we’re too savage, but you don’t hear anyone accusing Conservative Central Office of being gratuitously benevolent.’

These were the years when alternative comedy at last reached the home, though it was never domesticated. The Young Ones depicted four students sharing a sublimely dilapidated house. We were introduced to a hippy, a punk, a ‘wide boy’, a sociology student and their erratic Polish landlord. Of the four, only Mike, the wide boy, was a creation of the Eighties and yet he was the character who provoked the least laughter. For until deep into the decade, the favourites remained the old favourites. The Two Ronnies and Morecambe and Wise still set the nation laughing, as, until his death in 1984, did Tommy Cooper. Their baton was picked up by Cannon and Ball and Little and Large. The direct, apolitical and apparently artless comedy of former years never lost its hold, and many comics whose oeuvre might be thought antithetical to variety later paid tribute to that tradition.

In the Eighties, a second musical invasion occurred. After the dip of the Seventies, British pop music began once more to startle and surprise, and the American charts were soon awash with British acts. A third of all ‘chart-toppers’ were British; such an invasion had not been seen since the Sixties. For decades, popular music had been driven by a quest for the ‘authentic’, with the ‘serious’ musician habitually looking backwards to an heroic age of purity. In the Eighties the source of inspiration shifted: the future now issued a peremptory summons. The anthem for this change was the suggestively titled ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’ by the Buggles. Style was all, and it was a style in which the wildest retrogression mingled with an almost astringent futurity. The names of the groups themselves evoked this: Visage, Depeche Mode, Culture Club, the Style Council, New Order, the Human League, Spandau Ballet, Ultravox, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, Gary Numan and the Eurythmics. The alarmingly named Kajagoogoo had begun its brief life in the public eye as ‘Art Nouveau’. In Adam and the Ants, the dandy had returned, but without the menace and aggression of the Fifties Teddy boys. Adam Ant was swathed in the glittering lustre of a Regency beau at a masquerade or the voluminous cloak of a highwayman. Elegance could find other manifestations: Spandau Ballet and Duran Duran performed in what seemed to be the best of Savile Row tailoring. The ‘New Romantics’ was the term applied to many of these groups.

The guitar, the supremely workingclass instrument, now ceded place to the synthesizer, an unmistakable symbol of modernity. This portable electric keyboard provided the distinctive sound of the early Eighties with a frantic but colourless buzz. The prevalent timbre of the voices was dull and punctuated by leaps into falsetto. The old word ‘band’, connoting brotherhood, was replaced by ‘group’; impersonal, expressive of nothing. It was a fitting reflection of the age. Indeed, with ‘groups’ springing up and dying back over mere months, it was small wonder that many artists, women in particular, chose to go solo. The pop musicians of the period were seldom openly gay, but it scarcely mattered; the queer ethos was everywhere. As if in reaction, groups like Wham! evoked the style of Fifties rockers in their sun-swept, if ersatz, masculinity. In one of the period’s better ironies, it transpired that George Michael, the lead singer and the supposed embodiment of clean-cut heterosexuality, was himself gay.

And at a time when homosexuality had become the object of increasing hostility, gay groups were well placed to resurrect a forgotten musical genre in the protest song. Frankie Goes to Hollywood was a largely gay group whose music suffered so much tinkering in the studio that only trace elements of its members’ contribution were discernible. The public cared little, however. In ‘Relax’, they offered a song so obviously suggestive of sex that it was taken off the air. In the video for ‘Two Tribes’, world leaders were shown in a boxing ring. During the Seventies, English musicians had largely eschewed the great questions of the day; even the Sex Pistols addressed them only obliquely. In any case, no focus for anger could exist when there was still a political consensus. In the Eighties, an enemy had arisen in the human shape of Margaret Thatcher. Now a spring of dissent could blossom.

By the late Eighties, the individualism of most recent music had receded before a movement whose aim, if it had one, was the dissolution of the self. ‘Acid house’ had arrived from the United States by way of the party island of Ibiza. It was an almost entirely electronic confection, with musicians nowhere to be seen. The dull thrum of the beat was overlaid by a still darker bass note, and within those liberal confines the ‘songwriters’ were free to add whatever tunes or lyrics they could lift from other artists. The effect could be mesmerizing or galvanizing. LSD was the amuse-bouche for early acid house. However, the drug was quickly displaced by MDMA or, when taken in pill form, ‘ecstasy’. The emblem for the drug, and for the music, was a smiling face. For a time, the ravers were indeed all smiles, but the drug was still illegal. The government began to clamp down on the revellers and the concerts decamped to the countryside, where ‘raves’ could continue unmolested. ‘House party’ no longer evoked a weekend away in a stately home, but a vast open-air concert in the dead of night. There was a gathering known as the ‘Second Summer of Love’ in 1988, where 50,000 attended, and a third in 1989.

Initially these conclaves proved almost impossible for the law to detect. However obvious the signs of their presence – lorries, lights, stadia, music swelling over fields of sugar beet – the raves could spring up anywhere, and the organizers proved adept at luring the police into countryside cul-de-sacs. But such strategies fell victim to an ancient principle: once the crime has been committed, time favours the law. The police began to adopt the methods of their quarry and soon the illegal outdoor ‘rave’ became little more than a wistful memory.

The music itself was to prove yet another example of the English genius for restitching foreign fashions. In front of a solitary disc jockey mixing melodies and beats, dancers swayed and writhed as if before a priest preparing a sacrifice. Indeed, it seems more than coincidental that this movement ripened in tandem with a religious revival, one as striking as it was ephemeral. The Pentecostal movement, largely Afro-Caribbean in origin, had spread to the white suburbs and even into the city. There it became ‘charismatic’. As if its meaning had not already changed enough, ‘house party’ could now refer to a weekend away on an evangelical retreat. There was a surge of new religious movements or cults, with Mormons, ‘Moonies’ and Hare Krishna devotees increasingly in evidence. The first tales of alien abduction began to be heard and garish rumours of satanic sexual abuse slid into the tabloid press. Happily, they proved insubstantial, but they too were a sign that the so-called age of consumption was avid for the wondrous, the bizarre and the unearthly.

In the spring of 1984, news came that Ethiopia had fallen victim to a famine. Even to a nation jaded by pictures of Belfast bombings, the images of suffering had the power to move and appal. One man was convinced that something could be done, and by musicians. Bob Geldof, lead singer of the Boomtown Rats, possessed an almost boundless force of will. In November 1984, he and Midge Ure of Ultravox composed ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ for famine relief, and it soon sold over 3 million records. But Geldof had only begun his mission. He appeared on television, tired, tousled and plainly impatient, addressing the camera with jabbing finger. ‘If you’ve given your money already, go to your neighbour and bang on their door and tell them to send some too.’ In 1985, he employed his formidable skills as missionary and arm-twister to cajole the great and good of the musical world to play at a concert, for free. It was to be called ‘Live Aid’. Although George Harrison had established a precedent in a concert for Bangladesh in 1972, nothing on this scale had been attempted. More remarkable yet, it was all arranged within a month. Over a fifth of the world’s population watched the concert and it generated many millions; as with many such feats, the purity of the original vision occluded many troublesome questions about its effects. The important thing, as Geldof proclaimed, was that something be done. The idea is with us still: good intentions are sacred in themselves. It was not quite a Thatcherite position, but it suited the climate well and set a precedent. The role of the musician was no longer to furnish entertainment; he or she was now moral instructor and spiritual guide.

Another conception of the artist as deserving beneficiary rather than paid jongleur was seen in the artistic community’s response to Thatcher and Thatcherism. Indeed, the reaction of many artists seemed not so much emotional or intellectual as olfactory; she stank in their nostrils till they quivered. Jonathan Miller spoke of her ‘suburban gentility … her saccharine patriotism.’ How could such a one understand the aspirations and yearnings of the true artist? The hatred had at least as much to do with her policies as with her personality. Although her government spent more on the arts than its predecessor, it spent less as a percentage of GDP, which could not help but impinge upon an innately delicate realm. Particularly for those in the performing arts, labour-intensive and largely unprofitable as they must be, the smallest dip in subsidy could result in ruin; this was seen in the collapse of the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company in 1982. The answer, Thatcher reasoned, was to bring in the businessmen, which only exacerbated matters for the intelligentsia: was the holy of holies to ring with the vulgar cries of the costermonger? Moreover, the theatre particularly had a proud tradition of leftist sympathies; the values of drama and Thatcherism were thus felt to be irreconcilable.

54

Was she always right?

In some quarters of the artistic establishment, Thatcher was openly declared a fascist. Her politics were understood as ‘an authoritarian dogma … bright with pastels’. In Greek, Steven Berkoff’s reimagining of Oedipus Tyrannus, the Jocasta character refers to Thatcher as ‘dear old Maggot’, mentioning that her portrait is on the wall beside one of Hitler. A production of Richard III was criticized for failing to make a comparison between the hunchbacked tyrant and the current prime minister. An increasingly politicized Harold Pinter seemed to take it for granted that Thatcher represented a new and sinister mutation of the fascist plague. In popular culture, the notion was still more prevalent. A video for the pop group the Communards depicted Britain as a totalitarian state, with grey overcoats and menacing guards in evidence. And Spitting Image regularly portrayed Thatcher in the attire of a military leader who had attained power by dubious means. It may be that the word ‘fascist’ had lost some of its power as the generations rolled. When Enoch Powell was heckled with cries of ‘fascist’ and ‘Nazi’, he remarked, ‘Before many of those accusing me of fascism and Nazism were born, I was fighting both fascism and Nazism.’

Thatcher herself was certainly authoritarian in temperament and often in address. She was deeply unpopular even among many who voted for her. She was unapologetic in her belief that the police were the guardians of law and order and should be respected as such. That she presided over more than her due share of battles between policemen and dissidents cannot be denied. In education, she imposed a national curriculum on unwilling teachers, though her influence in that sphere was far less pervasive than was generally believed. During the Falklands War, her willingness to accept help from the Chilean dictator Pinochet stained her in the eyes of many. And it may be that her very poise counted against her: she was always right.

But her regime was as liberal as any before or since; she was a lifelong foe of tyranny; she placed herself in the firing line whenever one existed; she was democratically elected three times; and she gave succour to the impulse for freedom whenever she thought it had a chance of life. The charge that she was a ‘Little Englander’ was harder to refute, though in truth she was more of a ‘Big Englander’; she did not understand the aspirations of Wales or Scotland, and tended to construe Great Britain as no more than a greater England.

But whether a ‘little’ or ‘big’ Englander, Thatcher was hard to perceive as a European. This was not through want of effort on her part. She had been an enthusiastic supporter of the Common Market and a leading participant in the negotiations that led to the Single European Act. It may be that landslide of 1987 had lent Thatcher a new sense of confidence that rendered impregnable her notion of Britain leading Europe by its example of capitalist revolution. It was her misfortune to have as antagonist a man whose understanding of the European Community, and Britain’s role in it, was quite different.

Jacques Delors had been appointed president of the Commission in part owing to Thatcher’s good offices. In her eyes, he was vastly preferable to the alternative candidate, a socialist; Delors respected Thatcher as a ‘rich and complex character’, who had done much to accelerate the progress of the Single Market. In the aftermath of the Single European Act of 1985, a largely British achievement, they had worked well together; yet few political honeymoons have proved quite so tempestuous or indeed ephemeral. Delors, like de Gaulle before him, found it hard to distinguish between the interests of France and those of the European Community. Moreover, the brash new anglophone world forged by Reagan and Thatcher was little to his taste. And for all his energy and apparent modernity, Delors seemed the denizen of an older world, one in which France ruled the conference table just as Britain ruled the waves. On one occasion, when asked why he refused to speak in English, Delors retorted: ‘Parce que le Français c’est la langue de la diplomatie … ’ (Because French is the language of diplomacy). And in a growling undertone, he added: ‘et de la civilization!’ (and of civilization).

Between two such mastiffs, each convinced of the justice of their cause, a clash was inevitable. On 6 July 1988, Delors delivered a speech in which he predicted that 80 per cent of the Community’s economy and much of its social and political policy would be determined at European rather than national level. He added, two weeks later, that the ‘germ’ of a European government was now laid. These statements alone would have been enough to irritate and even dismay the British prime minister, but Delors then committed a more serious offence. On 8 September, he took his case for federalism to the British TUC.

Under Michael Foot, the Labour party had been almost implacably hostile to Britain’s membership of the EEC. The European project was a capitalist cartel that had compromised Britain’s sovereignty and would render nearly impossible the implementation of a truly socialist programme in Britain. By 1987, with the more pragmatic Neil Kinnock as leader, the party had softened its stance. Speaking quietly, Delors appeared to promise the unions a restoration of the rights they had assumed in the Seventies. ‘Dear friends,’ he said in valediction. ‘We need you.’ Almost to a member, the congress rose in enraptured applause. It says much for his powers of persuasion that even Michael Foot, seeing his beloved unions wooed, now began to support the EEC.

Not only had Delors placed himself in the vanguard of a vision that Thatcher could never accept, he was now appealing to her oldest and greatest enemies in its defence. An opportunity to make her feelings known came quickly when, in September 1988, she was invited to address the College of Europe in Bruges. Her speech began innocuously enough, as she hastened to root Britain firmly within Europe, its traditions and values. Then the tone changed: ‘But we British have in a special way contributed to Europe. Over the centuries we have fought to prevent Europe from falling under the dominance of a single power. We have fought and we have died for her freedom … Had it not been for that willingness to fight and to die, Europe would have been united long before now – but not in liberty, not in justice.’

Up to this point, the speech had been well judged, with references to British help for Europe balanced by praise for Belgian courage. Now she directed the conference’s attention to the east. ‘The European Community is one manifestation of … European identity, but it is not the only one. We must never forget that east of the Iron Curtain, people who once enjoyed a full share of European culture, freedom and identity have been cut off from their roots. We shall always look on Warsaw, Prague and Budapest as great European cities.’ The message was plain: Europe must look beyond Western Europe. But the vision, though expansive, was incomplete. Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Albania and Russia, having nothing in the way of a capitalist tradition, simply did not count. ‘Europe,’ she continued, ‘will be stronger precisely because it has France as France, Spain as Spain, Britain as Britain, each with its own customs, traditions and identity.’ The nation state, not the Commission, should be at the heart of Europe. That this ran counter to at least some of the reforms established by the Single European Act was an irony lost on her. Nonetheless, Thatcher’s understanding of a Europe run by European nations was thoroughly of a piece with her support for British membership in 1973. The term ‘Eurosceptics’ was not yet in currency, but even if it had been, the Bruges speech furnishes no evidence that Thatcher was of their number.

Later in the speech, she made the assertion for which the speech will always be remembered. ‘We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them reimposed at European level with a European superstate exercising a new dominance from Brussels.’ Perhaps she imagined that this would go down well in Bruges, a rival Belgian city, but it seems improbable. Ironically enough, the expression ‘superstate’ was one of the few with which none in her party, or in the Foreign Office, took issue at the time.

The free movement of peoples was all very well, she suggested, but border controls were needed if the citizen was to be protected from crime, drugs or illegal immigrants. The speech trumpeted NATO, though with a warning that member states of the union should begin to pay their share. She also invoked her bête noire, protectionism. ‘We have a responsibility,’ she said, ‘to give a lead on this, a responsibility which is particularly directed towards the less developed countries. They need not only aid; more than anything they need improved trading opportunities if they are to gain the dignity of growing economic strength and independence.’

It was a point that was also to be raised by many on the left, for whom the European Community was an overfed giant that squatted on the smaller economies, crushing all breath from them. It was altogether a remarkable affair, but none foresaw how deeply it would alter Thatcher’s reputation and her dealings with those in Europe. Howe was forthright when he read the first draft, remarking that ‘there are some plain and fundamental errors in the draft and … it tends to view the world as though we had not adhered to any of the treaties.’ It was a just point, but then Howe went further. While he agreed that ‘a stronger Europe does not mean the creation of a superstate’, he re-emphasized the unpalatable fact that it ‘does and will require the sacrifice of political independence and the rights of national parliaments. That is inherent in the treaties.’

This Thatcher could never accept, yet Howe was right. Clause Eleven of the Treaty of Accession had made it quite clear that the laws of the European Community would supersede those of the English parliament. Thatcher’s curious doublethink on the matter ended in what Howe was later to call her ‘defection’ from the party. Whatever the intention may have been, the speech achieved precisely the opposite of what many had hoped. Thatcher could not but intrude her own vision in a speech conceived to celebrate AngloEuropean unity. Now, however inadvertently, she had opened a fissure between herself and her colleagues in the cabinet, in the party and in Europe.

55

Money, money, money

The Conservatives had been elected on a promise of economic salvation, reelected when recession turned into a boom, and elected again because enough of the populace had become wealthy. New wealth had created new types – along with the ‘yuppie’ was the ‘wide boy’, immortalized by the comedian Harry Enfield and his catchphrase ‘I’ve got loadsa money!’ This figure marked a revolution. There had been only a few epochs in English history in which ‘conspicuous consumption’ was not a matter for shame; this decade was one such epoch, but with a difference. The arrivistes of the Tudor or Victorian periods had attempted to array themselves in the ermine of pedigree, but the newly rich of the Eighties had no such anxieties. They did not seek to hide their origins or to emulate the accents of the upper class. They had ‘made good’ and that was enough.

In tandem with the wide boys strode the Sloane Rangers, a type made famous by The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook. The ‘Sloanes’ were rich, conservative and rural in sympathy if not always in location; they dressed in tweeds and ‘ate jelly with a fork’. In many respects they were thought to represent the last hurrah of old money, but this was erroneous. By the end of the decade, those who had inherited wealth still accounted for the top 57 per cent of the wealthy. ‘Popular capitalism’ was the term Thatcher adopted to encapsulate her vision of a property-owning democracy, an expression that had little resonance and less charm for many of the poorest.

‘Care in the community’, as it became known in the late Eighties, was an offshoot of the influential Griffiths Report of 1983. The report’s main suggestion was that superfluous expenses might be removed if managers could oversee and correct an organization sometimes lacking in efficiency and accountability. In the same spirit, it encouraged the view that the elderly or mentally ill should receive treatment at home. Roy Griffiths believed fervently in the NHS, but he felt it could do better under something resembling a business model. Moreover, the notion that patients could be better served within their own homes seemed a more humanitarian proposition than a lifetime spent within an institution. But many could not thrive or even survive at home, and found too little around their home that could be called a community. The cumulative result was a rise in homelessness. The National Audit Office suggested that the figure in 1989 had reached 126,000.

When a little-known MP named Jeremy Corbyn rose in the House to call the soaring levels of homelessness a ‘disgrace’, Thatcher barely turned her head. In this case, she could not easily be blamed. By 1990, a startling 100,000 council houses stood empty, and the government was to spend £300 million renovating them. Another 600,000 private properties were similarly unused, and that was harder to remedy. Grants and other incentives to housing associations were provided by the Housing Act of 1988, but the crisis of homelessness could only be eased, not abolished.

The unions had been tamed, but another traditionally leftist foe had submitted neither to lash nor leash. For the Tories, animated by the principle that ‘central knows best’, local councils were a hydra of jostling irritations. The first of these, predictably, concerned money. True to her conviction that people can be trusted to take responsibility where they feel they have a financial stake, Thatcher was anxious about the seeming unaccountability of so many local councils. If, she reasoned, the rates levied on property were to be replaced by a tax on the individual, members of the public would become true local taxpayers, shareholders with the right to demand proper standards. Councils in turn would therefore have to justify their expenditure and their policies. The notion was first seriously mooted in 1983 and took some years to gestate. When at last the new tax was approved, it was given the most innocuous of titles: the community charge.

A second thistle hid within a paradox. The Tories might govern the land, but their rivals governed the cities. The consequences of this lay in education, which was the responsibility of local government and persistently overlooked by the Conservatives. Those children, the vast majority, who did not go to private schools, grew up under a right-wing government but received a left-wing education. This alone ensured that the shadow of the post-war consensus still stretched over the Thatcher government, and that years after the memory of the Seventies had dulled, Thatcher was still vilified in increasingly vague but no less vituperative terms.

In some left-wing boroughs, the children of immigrants were encouraged to read and write in their mother tongues rather than in English. Young, Gay and Proud was the title of a book for secondary school students. The honest impetus behind such initiatives did not protect them from attack. Indeed it was precisely the eclectic approach of such councils that led, some argued, to the Conservative victory of 1987. In its election campaign, the Conservative party placed some of the more provocative textbook titles with the question: ‘Is this Labour’s idea of a comprehensive education?’

Under Ken Livingstone, or ‘Red Ken’, the Greater London Council had proved particularly noxious to the prime minister, with its unabashed socialism, its sometimes uncritical support for fringe causes, and its wholehearted welcome of anything associated with ethnic minorities. That it was led by a true Londoner, who recognized that afternoon tea and scones had given way in the metropolis to curry and rice, did not sweeten matters. Happily for Thatcher, the GLC had its gun squarely trained on its own foot. When it transpired that the council had spent more on the advertising campaign to preserve its own existence than the money collected for the Ethiopian famine, its socialist credentials became harder to maintain.

No longer was there talk of the unions bringing down the government, but Nigel Lawson was not alone in feeling that the prime minister’s renewed self-confidence in the wake of the 1987 landslide was not entirely wholesome. And this self-confidence was now deployed in an arena where the foe had grown considerably more nimble. Thatcher’s last great achievement in Europe had been the Single European Act. Although it had included legislation that freed the Community from any internal trade restrictions, the act also paved the way for monetary union. It was perhaps an uneasy recognition of this that had led to the Bruges speech. But now an unsettling shift had occurred. Where before Thatcher had been at the heart of matters, pushing for ever fewer trade restrictions, she now seemed alone. It is possible that her very strength now seemed an anachronism; the new Europe, under Jacques Delors, had a warm embrace for biddable ciphers, not for those who knew their own minds, however flawed.

Unsuspected by Thatcher or Reagan, the eastern bloc had been steadily crumbling for years. The nations of central and Eastern Europe relied on Russia for their oil and gas, and on Western loans for much else. Russia itself needed Eastern Europe for raw materials. It could not continue. Eastern Europe faced bankruptcy and Hungary was the first to go, slipping away from the bloc in 1988 with so little fanfare that its pioneering defection is hardly remembered. In 1989, the harassed leader of East Germany announced that citizens from East Berlin would be allowed to cross the Berlin Wall. The Berlin Wall was first climbed before being breached and then torn down. Czechoslovakia and Poland fell next. The nations closest to Russia, culturally and politically, took longer, but by that point it scarcely mattered to the West: a great shadow had lifted. Thatcher’s own contribution had been ancillary to the contest between Reagan and Gorbachev, but a midwife was still indispensable. Yet what role now for Britain in the uncertain world that had opened?

The European Community had changed too, but here also Britain’s role seemed diminished. Jacques Delors had imbued the increasingly tired and sclerotic EEC with his own sharply federalist vision, in which monetary union would render national currencies obsolete. More radically yet, such a union would be followed, in time, by its political equivalent. British statesmen since Macmillan had urged their colleagues to press on with European membership in order to influence the Community at its heart, confident that it could ‘steer Europe away from federalism’. To some extent, this promise had been fulfilled. On Britain’s insistence, the EEC had at last begun to consider those countries behind the Iron Curtain as European. And the Single European Act was a largely British project. But as Thatcher noted, there was no hope of a retreat from the federalist course, and with the unification of Germany looming, Britain’s pretensions to the status of paramount European power appeared self-deluding.

But first, the currency question had to be addressed. Both Nigel Lawson, the chancellor, and Geoffrey Howe, now foreign secretary, believed that entry into the Exchange Rate Mechanism could no longer be delayed. Thatcher was unconvinced, but the big beasts were not to be cowed. On 25 July 1989, they warned that they would both resign over the issue. The challenges had begun to mount. When they flew out for the Madrid Summit later that day, an arctic silence prevailed between Thatcher and Howe. At the summit, Thatcher surprised the rebels, agreeing that Britain should enter the ERM. A month later she removed Howe from the Foreign Office, but if she recognized that the anger she felt towards him was now being reciprocated, she did not show it.

On 26 October, Lawson resigned, a decision long in the brewing. In the end, he had been undermined by Sir Alan Walters, Thatcher’s economic adviser, who questioned his judgement in an article for the Financial Times. Keeping sterling pegged to the fortunes of the Deutschmark had become Lawson’s obsession, and even rising inflation could not divert him. It was a rare lapse: he had been responsible for lifting almost a million of the poorest out of the tax system, for sowing and irrigating growth and investment on every side. His was a remarkable talent and the prime minister could little afford the loss.

When John Major was summoned to Number Ten, in order to replace Lawson as chancellor, he found the nation’s unbendable leader ‘close to tears’. She had never been so outfaced, and now a frightened little girl broke through the carapace. A more superstitious woman might have begun to study the signs: 1990 was full of disquieting omens. By-election results appeared to predict a Conservative defeat. On 30 July, Ian Gow, Thatcher’s former parliamentary private secretary, was killed by the IRA. Resignations, defections and conspiracies seemed to loom in the shadows. A month after Lawson’s resignation in October 1989, the unthinkable happened in the form of a challenge. Sir Anthony Meyer bid for the leadership. Thatcher received almost ten times as many votes, but the tremors of dissent were unmistakable. The next of many resignations came about largely by ill luck and unthinking flippancy, when in July 1990 Nicholas Ridley resigned over a faux pas in which he had compared European Monetary Union with the Third Reich. As with so many such blunders, much depended on context.

On 5 October 1990, Major and Thatcher announced Britain’s entry to the ERM. Major beamed, while Thatcher slipped on her patient smile. She had wanted inflation brought down first, while Major had argued that ERM membership would achieve that. Inflation was then running at 10.9 per cent. Nonetheless, euphoria flowered in the press and in the City. It would take only a few years for the flower to shrivel. The Rome Summit was held at the end of October. It was ragged and unsatisfactory, and Thatcher was not impressed by the Italian chair. At last, Thatcher openly opposed stage two of the Delors Report. She had envisaged the ‘ecu’, as it was still termed, as a currency that would run in tandem with national currencies, but now it seemed as if it would be imposed. Whatever lay over the hill could not be seen, but Thatcher saw smoke rising, and that was enough for her.

When she returned to the House, Thatcher found it in savage and mocking revolt. Baited by both Kinnock and Paddy Ashdown, she turned and bit. ‘Mr Delors said at a press conference the other day that he wanted the European Parliament to be the democratic body of the Community, he wanted the Commission to be the executive and he wanted the Council of Ministers to be the senate. No, no, no.’ It was intoned with utter finality. Howe, for one, was appalled. If it was hard for many to see how her position differed materially from his, it was clear enough to him. In her Bruges speech, Thatcher had spoken approvingly of the use of the ecu. Now, an unfathomably deep crevasse had opened.

On 1 November, having been effectively demoted and disparaged, Howe resigned as deputy prime minister and lord president of the council. He asked to speak in the House to explain his decision, and in soft tones began to dismantle his colleague and former ally, the prime minister. His first remarks were suffused with quiet irony. ‘If some of my former colleagues are to be believed, I must be the first minister in history who has resigned because he was in full agreement with government policy.’ Thatcher sat still, head cocked, an indulgent smile on her lips. ‘Not one of our economic achievements,’ he continued, ‘would have been possible without the courage and leadership of my right hon. Friend.’ Thatcher’s smile did not alter. He invoked too their former collaboration in Europe, ‘from Fontainebleau to the Single European Act’. Then, with the preliminary courtesies performed, he began the attack. ‘There was, or should have been, nothing novel about joining the ERM.’ He told the House that he and Lawson had consistently urged Mrs Thatcher to join the ERM, before assuring it that he did not ‘regard the Delors Report as some kind of sacred text’. He invoked Macmillan, who in 1962 had urged the nation to take its place at the heart of the EEC. Howe protested that we should not ‘retreat into a ghetto of sentimentality about our past and so diminish our own control over our own destiny in the future …’ He went on to say that ‘had we been ready, in the much too simple phrase, to surrender some sovereignty at a much earlier stage … we should have had more, not less influence, over the Europe we have today. We should never forget the lesson of that isolation.’ A choice between a Europe of entirely independent states and a federal one was ‘a false antithesis, a bogus dilemma … as if there were no middle way. We commit,’ he urged, ‘a serious error if we think always in terms of surrendering sovereignty.’ He contrasted Churchill’s stance with ‘the nightmare image sometimes conjured up by my right hon. Friend … who seems sometimes to look out upon a continent … scheming, in her words, to “extinguish democracy”, to “dissolve our national identities” and to lead us “through the back-door into a federal Europe”. What kind of vision is that, Mr Speaker … for our young people?

‘None of us wants the imposition of a single currency,’ he assured the House. ‘The risk is not imposition but isolation … with Britain once again scrambling to join the club later, after the rules have been set … Asked whether we would veto any arrangement that jeopardized the pound sterling, my Right Honourable Friend replied simply, “Yes.” The question of the ecu would be addressed “only by future generations. Those future generations are with us today.”’ Visibly warming to his theme, Howe decided that a cricketing metaphor might be apt. The chancellor and the governor of the Bank of England, he suggested, had been placed in the position of ‘opening batsmen … only for them to find, the moment the first balls are bowled, that their bats have been broken before the game by the team captain’.

The House laughed loud and long. Nigel Lawson, in the row behind Howe, permitted himself the briefest flash of a grin. He then quoted a letter to him from a British businessman living and working on the Continent, trading in Brussels and elsewhere, who wrote that ‘people throughout Europe see our Prime Minister’s finger wagging and hear her passionate, “No, No, No”, much more clearly than the content of the carefully worded formal texts.’ A little later, Howe’s reserve broke. ‘Cabinet government is all about trying to persuade one another from within … the task has become futile.’ If there had been any doubt as to Howe’s real intent, it was dissolved by his final words: ‘The time has come for others to consider their own response to the tragic conflict of loyalties with which I have myself wrestled for perhaps too long.’ The House heard the simple words of a man honestly aggrieved. It was a reliably devastating device.

The next day, Michael Heseltine formally challenged the prime minister for the leadership. He had had a mixed career under Thatcher’s rule. While he had done much to invigorate Liverpool and the Docklands area, and had served well as the government’s ‘ambassador’ in its dealings with environmental groups, he was perhaps too flamboyant and ambitious to garner very much affection in the House. He was also a passionate Europhile at a time when such a loyalty seemed suspect. Less than five years previously, he had resigned from the cabinet over the so-called ‘Westland affair’, a controversy so involved and intricate that Thatcher later reflected, ‘I can’t even remember what the actual Westland thing was about now.’ Few could.

At root, it was the tale of an ailing helicopter company that some felt needed to be rescued. Two bids for Westland had been made, one American and one European. Michael Heseltine, as defence secretary, had strongly supported the European bid. Given that it was the less ‘capitalist’ of the alternatives, offering far more bureaucracy than its rival, it was never likely to have Thatcher’s support. In an effort to contain him, Thatcher placed Heseltine under something like a gagging order, but it proved quite ineffective. On 9 January, he demanded in cabinet that all the options be discussed, and when Thatcher refused, he swept out and announced to the press outside that he had resigned. As he gathered his papers, she said simply, ‘I’m sorry.’ Whether or not she was sincere, the sentiment was widely shared. Indeed, ‘Tarzan’, as Heseltine had become known, enjoyed far greater popularity than the prime minister herself. Moreover, he had not been idle in his five years on the back benches. He had toured constituency associations all over the country, sounding out support obliquely but unmistakably.

Heseltine’s gesture dominated the headlines, but the matter of greater moment was the cabinet’s agreement to approve the community charge, introduced on 1 April 1989 in Scotland and a year later in England. The choice of April Fool’s day was an unhappy one; the sly, bland misnomer never caught the public imagination and it was soon replaced by ‘the poll tax’. A fomenter of riots and a slayer of kings, the poll tax had brought down Richard II himself, and the attempt to implement it proved disastrous from the outset. It was formidably difficult to collect, and its manifest inequities enraged even natural Conservatives. While it might have seemed only fair that the citizen should pay for what he or she received in services from the local council, the less well-off were immediately disadvantaged. How could it be just that a poor widow should pay as much as a millionaire? A campaign of non-compliance began, under the slogan ‘Can’t pay, won’t pay’. Kenneth Baker, architect of the tax, assured the country on television that ‘the community charge is here to stay’. The bland complacency in his smile seemed to many to sum up the government’s attitude to all popular discontent, and then came the riots.

On Saturday, 31 March 1990, a protest in Trafalgar Square was blocked by the police. In minutes, violence had erupted. The nation saw mounted policemen charging at civilians, but felt no sympathy for the forces of the law. Thatcher blamed ‘Marxists’ for the violence, and the Marxists blamed the anarchists, but behind the whole protest movement lay the Militant tendency. Thatcher’s sympathies were plain: at the sight of smashed windows and overturned cars she could only exclaim, ‘Oh, those poor shopkeepers!’

After her grand ‘No, no, no’ in the Commons, popular perceptions of Thatcher shifted. She was increasingly regarded as unhinged as well as tyrannical. Spitting Image presented her with the manner of a Nero or Caligula, with rolling eyes and fiddle in hand. But she was not deranged nor even deluded, merely blinkered. She was, however, alone, having sacked more ministers than any other prime minister in British history. The poll tax had put her at odds with the nation, and her position on Europe with her own party. With Whitelaw incapacitated by a stroke, and Tebbit having left the cabinet to care for his wife, she had lost both her protectors, the guard dog and the guardian angel. Like many ministers before and since, Howe resigned when there was comparatively little to resign from. As far as he was concerned, the captain seemed bent on scuttling the ship. It was a just cause for mutiny.

56

The curtain falls

In the first ballot of the leadership contest, Thatcher won her majority, and expressed almost oleaginous pleasure to the cameras. But it was a charade and all knew it; her majority was not large enough to fend off a second ballot. Had only two of Heseltine’s supporters voted the other way, she would have won outright. The outcome of a second ballot was far from certain. Heseltine was not popular enough to win, but the fact that he had lost by a whisker boded no good. One by one, her ministers came to visit her. None could guarantee the loyalty of his colleagues.

On Thursday 22 November, Thatcher announced her resignation. Tebbit was to call Heseltine ‘a serial Conservative assassin’. The image is not altogether apt: an assassin usually works for others. In the House, Thatcher was greeted by waving ballot papers. When pressed by the opposition on the question of betrayal, she supported her party. Privately, she was distraught. Alan Clark, a true believer, attempted to turn her mind to the glories of the past, but she could not be distracted. The nation did not mourn, but the staff at Downing Street openly wept as they presented her with a silver teapot. ‘How useful,’ was her characteristic response. A camera pointed at her limousine caught her leaning forward, with tears in her eyes and biting her lip.

Her vision had been refracted through prisms softer than her own, but when she spoke her mind, without filter or script, the effect was too often discordant and divisive. And towards the end, she even spoke her mind in defiance of government policy. Not Salisbury, Disraeli, Baldwin or even Sir Robert Walpole had sought so openly to remould the nation in their image. For this attempt alone, popular memory has found it hard to forgive her. Then must be reckoned the 3 million who lost their jobs in her battle with inflation, the hammer taken to the old mining communities, the disintegration of union power, her perceived philistinism, her weakness for tub-thumping, and the suspicion, shared by colleagues and country alike, that she could not listen.

In her own eyes, Thatcher had not ended the post-war settlement but had simply withdrawn it to the frontiers of the feasible. Certainly she did not turn Britain into a copy of the United States, as some suggested. In 1979, Thatcher found herself at the head of a mixed economy, and it was a mixed economy that she bequeathed, though the balance had tilted in favour of the private sector. But she did offer security, of a sort – security for the future, in bricks and mortar, in shares and investments, in a promise of wealth that could be passed on. Perhaps she would have wished the City less acquisitive, British culture less avid for pleasure, or the people less stubborn, but these were birds she had hatched. When Kingsley Amis told his heroine that his latest book concerned a Communist takeover of Britain, Thatcher advised him to ‘get another crystal ball’. And indeed she proved the better seer. Yet although she contributed to the end of the Cold War, it seemed to some as if she had no real desire for a peaceful settlement. She could never quite acclimatize herself to a world without the Red Menace. It had been the enemy for so long that she found it hard to identify new enemies except in relation to old.

When she left Downing Street, the Iron Lady floated away to political oblivion. But she could comfort herself with one certainty: John Major, her appointed dauphin, would surely continue her work. He had defeated Heseltine and Douglas Hurd. The ‘boy from Brixton’, charming, unassuming but tenacious, was ‘gold, just gold’, she told others. If he was wanting in fierce conviction, if he appeared a little too pragmatic on European questions, he was nevertheless ‘one of us’.

That John Major would succeed Thatcher in vision as well as in office was taken for granted by all save Major himself. For all his apparent mildness, Major was resolved to be a leader. The differences, both in style and in address, were legion. Some were more subtle than others. Thatcher may be called the last of the truly ‘English’ prime ministers of the twentieth century. She had wanted not only a nanny but ‘an English nanny’ to bring up her children. This sense of Englishness also informed her attitude to the Celtic nations. As a Londoner, John Major was only incidentally English, and his outlook was metropolitan rather than national. ‘What has the Conservative Party to offer to a workingclass kid from Brixton? It made him Prime Minister.’ So ran the party slogan for the 1992 election. The suggestion was cunning, if not entirely accurate. His father had run a business making that most English of artefacts, the garden ornament, and his mother had been a music hall artiste. The Majors’ fortunes dipped when the business ran into difficulties and the family was obliged to move into lodgings. Despite later claims, the family was more of the lower middle than of the working class, but the diligence so often associated with that group was not noticeable in the young John. He left school with only three O levels and a deep sense of shame for having let his parents down.

Once he had been elected as an MP, however, Major’s progress was startlingly swift. He became prime minister after only two years in the cabinet, during which time he had been foreign secretary and chancellor of the Exchequer. This remarkable ascent was to prove a mixed blessing; he had little experience and almost nothing in the way of identifiable political conviction. His great strengths, however, were already apparent. Where other politicians would pay attention chiefly to those they thought might be of use, Major greeted everyone with unaffected warmth. If anything, he paid more attention to ordinary people, seeming happiest when chatting to elderly mothers or attendant wives. He was, moreover, famous for an almost photographic memory for names and faces, and an attention to detail which impressed all who spent even a little time in his company. It was as well that Major had already established a reputation for emollience, for the clan of which he found himself head was a bloody and fractious one. Sharply aware of this, he divided his cabinet almost equally between the left and right wings of his party. His would be a rule by consensus, cabinet ‘as it should be’, as one former minister put it.

The ‘flagship’ of Thatcherism, the poll tax, had evoked Thatcher at her most doctrinaire, and was popularly thought to have destroyed her. Aside from its tainted association, the tax proved as unworkable as it had been unpopular. Fittingly, it fell to Michael Heseltine to put the already moribund community charge out of its misery. He replaced it with the ‘council tax’, a comparatively innocuous levy that is still with us. The poll tax had been in existence for less than a year, costing over £1.5 billion to set up and dismantle. In other respects, too, it proved costly. The Tory presence in Scotland took more than a generation to recover.

But before any domestic matters could be settled, the instinctively pacific John Major found himself leading a nation at war. In the previous year, a crisis had arisen in the Persian Gulf. Saddam Hussein, the bellicose ruler of Iraq, had invaded the gulf state of Kuwait, ousting its emir and redirecting its oil supplies to Iraq. The crisis came in the last stages of the Cold War, and President Bush had other reasons for bringing about a swift conclusion. The international community was supportive of the United States, and Britain, the United States’ chief ally, could scarcely be seen as a laggard.

Bush invited Major to Camp David. The gesture was presented as a meeting of families as much as of war leaders, but few doubted its true purpose. The president felt it best to address the real issue immediately: Iraq had been given until Thursday, 2 November 1990 to withdraw, but the president was under little illusion that it would comply. Diplomacy would still be employed, but, ‘John,’ he said, ‘if all this fails, we’re going to have to commit our troops in battle.’ Major assented. The United States could count on its ally, and it was made clear that neither cabinet nor parliament need be consulted. Like Thatcher, Major had been expecting war; unlike her, he approached it with no relish. He concealed his reservations so well that the president saw only wholehearted support. The meeting was otherwise affable and informal. Major’s style was more friendly and casual than Thatcher’s had been and the president warmed to him accordingly.

Saddam proved intransigent and the deadline for withdrawal loomed. War had become inevitable. On 16 January, the air attack would begin, a largely American effort intended to destroy at least 50 per cent of Saddam’s airborne strength. The counterinvasion was to be termed Operation Desert Storm. Before sending his troops to possible death, Major wanted to speak to them. He had no military experience of which to boast, even in the form of national service. All the more reason therefore for him to speak and, above all, to listen. When he met the troops, he quickly discovered that uncertainty was the chief concern. When Major told them that in all probability they were to be called upon to fight, he sensed mass relief. In spite of his military inexperience, he was in his element. The troops found him approachable and good-humoured. And Major was struck, above all, by the youth of the soldiers; they were, he reflected, no older than his own children.

He had promised the troops that the nation was behind them. This was true in part, but to people in their late teens and early twenties, weaned on a progressive and even pacifist education, this was a war fought not to contain aggression but to keep the oil flowing. But if expressions of disquiet were small and even unpopular – it was not unknown for students to be jostled or even assaulted – they established a precedent that would be followed on a far greater scale. The war itself was won by the spring. As a war leader, Major had been vindicated. Now a very different kind of struggle beckoned, one which he was determined should not bear the character of a conflict.

1991 was the year in which the communities of Western Europe met in Maastricht to determine the future direction of the European project. Major described himself as neither Europhile nor Eurosceptic, but as chancellor he had made his support for Britain’s entry to the ERM plain. It was at Maastricht that the strands of theory, economic expediency and political necessity were woven together. There, the European Economic Community became the European Union. Major’s was among the younger, more vigorous voices, and this, combined with his tenacity, ensured that two treasured ‘opt-outs’ were embedded in the final document. The United Kingdom would be obliged to accept neither the Social Chapter, in which were enshrined the rights to a minimum wage and to a maximum working week, nor, in the immediate future, monetary union. But critics were quick to point out that these assertions of power placed Britain on the fringes of influence, while doing nothing to halt the federalist advance. The treaty cannot be said to have aroused much enthusiasm among the English people, but it had consequences that were overlooked in the usual partisan squabbling. The Single European Act of 1987 had turned the Common Market into the Single Market; Maastricht removed any doubt that something far more comprehensive lay ahead.

57

The fall of sterling

The journalist Simon Heffer went so far as to proclaim that ‘nothing happened at Maastricht to keep Britain off the conveyor belt to federalism; indeed, quite the reverse’. This was perhaps an exaggeration, but it could not be doubted that, in obtaining the concessions it did, the Major government was implicitly offering a concession of its own. Britain could be only a rock in the midst of the federalist tide; it had no power to turn it. When Major commended the treaty to the House of Commons, he appeared to acknowledge as much, if only by omission: ‘This is a treaty which safeguards and advances our national interests. It advances the interests of Europe as a whole. It opens up new ways of cooperating in Europe … It is a good agreement for Europe, and a good agreement for the United Kingdom. I commend it to the House.’

In the eyes of moderates across the House, quiet persistence had succeeded where intransigence had failed. Even some Eurosceptics were pleased, or at least relieved. Thatcher herself largely kept her counsel, though in a private letter to Sir Bill Cash, a prominent Eurosceptic, she expressed the belief that the new direction of the EU was ‘contrary to British interests and damaging to our parliamentary democracy’. The rapture, or relief, in England was not altogether echoed on the Continent. Many were irritated by the opt-outs that Britain had secured. A federal Europe was the inevitable destination, so why did Britain insist on a back route? It should be noted that throughout the process, the mandarins of the Commission were perfectly clear in their intent. As one negotiator observed, ‘It’s getting tiring having to drag Britain along … we can lose the word “federalism” if they want, but …’ The elision was eloquent. In the event, ‘subsidiarity’ was the genial obfuscation selected in preference.

It was at the committee stage in parliament that the treaty’s labour pains began. Beside the Labour party, which wanted the opt-outs removed, the government had to reckon with dissent in its own ranks. At the treaty’s second reading, twenty-two ‘Maastricht rebels’ either voted against the government or abstained. Having lost the whip for their integrity, or audacity, few among them were surprised when it was returned to them. Major had intended this as an act of magnanimity but it was interpreted as weakness. On and on the negotiations trudged, with the rebels tabling amendment after amendment. With defeat looming again, it seemed that only another election could resolve the matter, but rather than take the issue to the country, he took it to the House. A confidence motion was proposed, and Major obtained his mandate. And so, after almost two years of prevarication and obstruction, the Maastricht Treaty was passed, by forty votes, on 20 July 1993.

It is easy now to forget the comparative youth of the movement known as Euroscepticism. Unlike Enoch Powell or Tony Benn, whose shared hostility to the European project was radical and immovable, the Eurosceptics were simply Thatcherite: they wished Britain to remain in the European Community, but in a free trade association rather than as part of a single polity. Any desire to ‘liberate’ Britain from Europe was confined to the fringes of the Right and the Left. But the fringe was now wider and its voice far louder. The treaty had been passed in a sullen, angry mood. Only months after Maastricht, the tycoon James Goldsmith set up the Referendum party. Its stated aim was to have a referendum on the subject of Britain’s continued membership of the EU, but many saw in this only resurgent nationalism. Similarly, the United Kingdom Independence Party, or UKIP, appeared in 1994 with a stated aim of withdrawing from the EU altogether. These two were regarded for a time as follies rather than parties, but they were at least ‘respectable’, disavowing the far right, its beliefs and all its works.

But in the early Nineties new groups were seen. Flyers began to appear on street corners and in telephone booths, depicting a skull with a Nazi helmet and urging violence against ‘the Enemy’. Names never before heard began to enter the lexicon. There was ‘Combat 18’, whose aims were openly terrorist. The British National Party, their first patron, was too soft for them. ‘Race – not nation,’ they proclaimed. There were also the mysterious ‘White Wolves’, who eagerly claimed every murder of a minority member as their own doing. The placatory but insidious voice of extreme nationalism, the League of St George, once excused James Goldsmith for being Jewish, however, conceding that ‘none of this is his fault’. Xenophobia has rarely been militant in Britain, and most of these groups soon choked on their own bile.

The election of 1992 had been preceded by a long and only intermittently optimistic Conservative campaign. The land was still in recession, and perhaps many missed in Major the ferocity and certitude of Thatcher. Neil Kinnock was the object of much affection and, being naturally flamboyant, he often had the best of Major in the House. Moreover, the Conservatives had been in power for thirteen years. On polling day, the prevalent mood was subdued. Only Major seemed buoyant as he returned to his Huntingdon seat. It was not until the early hours that the miracle became apparent: the Conservatives had won, and with the greatest polling majority ever known. Yet the 14 million votes translated into only twenty-one extra seats. The Tories had been confirmed in government, but their majority was too small to allow them to exercise power as they sought.

Neil Kinnock, so often decried as ‘the Welsh Windbag’, resigned with dignity – for all his achievements, he had led the party to its second defeat. Like Thatcher, he had a weakness for the soundbite. His advice to those living in a Conservative world had been stark. ‘Don’t be old, don’t be sick, don’t be ordinary, don’t be poor, don’t be unemployed.’ For Labour, the defeat of 1992 represented a watershed. Kinnock had been both firebrand and conciliator, a leftist bruiser and a cunning statesman, but his journey was not one he could share with his party.

John Smith, his successor, was by conviction a modernizer, though in an age where cosmetic considerations were paramount, he did not look like one. With his bullet head, his spectacles and thinning hair, he recalled a dour trade union leader of the old school. But his uninspiring exterior concealed a quick intelligence, a sharp sense of humour, and a deep sense of social justice. His judgement, however, was not always sound. While the country and the City were still reeling after Black Wednesday, he launched an attack that would have been more credible had he not himself supported the move into the ERM.

Britain had entered the ERM in the last days of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership. Since then, nothing had occurred to make the move seem anything but benign. Nigel Lawson had insisted that British interest rates be tied to those of Germany. Thatcher was unconvinced but when Major professed himself in agreement with Lawson, there was little that the Iron Lady felt she could do but accept. The pound, she ordained, was to be ‘pegged’ to the Deutschmark at 2.95. When Major, then chancellor, told his opposite number in Germany of the decision, he was told that such a matter was not one for the prime minister to decide. The rules of the EC dictated that the matter be discussed and agreed upon. That was not Thatcher’s style, of course, and the rate remained. It was not a propitious start, nor, as events were to prove, a wise decision.

Entry into the ERM, touted by Major among others as a cure for inflation, had by 1992 done nothing to ease the recession of the late Eighties. If anything, it seemed to have accelerated it. One million lost their jobs. A new and virulent strain of poverty appeared, one which struck the previously affluent, and with it arrived a new term, ‘negative equity’, with houses suddenly worth less than the mortgages taken out to pay for them. Moreover, the high interest rate that Britain was forced to adopt brought the country back to the unhappy days of the Seventies; British exports became once more uncompetitive. Still, inflation appeared again to be shackled, as Major had prophesied. But even here, an objection could be raised. At a dinner hosted by Andrew Neil, the editor of the Sunday Times, Major crowed his triumph as the prime minister who had ended the threat of inflation. At this, one of the journalists present asked, ‘What’s the point of having low inflation if the economy is not just on its knees, but on its back?’ In one form or another, the question would be repeated in the months to come.

On the Continent, within the quiet confines of the Bundesbank, troubling events had also begun to unfold. East Germany was now within the capitalist pale of the West, but the cost of its inclusion was climbing ever higher. The Bundesbank was independent of the German state and could take decisions as it saw fit. In the summer of 1992, it raised interest rates. Helmut Schlesinger, the Bundesbank president, felt bound to act according to ‘what is necessary at home’. In Britain, the effect was instant. High interest rates hit the housing market, and ‘For Sale’ boards sprang up like nettles. By late summer, currency traders began to sell pounds and buy Deutschmarks, with the result that sterling sank to the lowest level permitted within the ERM. Once again, a British chancellor was caught in a web of irreconcilable priorities, but despite his private misgivings, Norman Lamont publicly rejected the possibility either of devaluation or of exit.

Chancellor Kohl had sent Major a letter in which he indicated that he would also like to see German interest rates lowered. Major had high hopes. Lamont was altogether less sanguine. At a meeting of national and EC finance ministers in Bath, Lamont was met by protesters demanding that Britain leave the ERM. Neither he nor his continental colleagues were reassured. There was much to be discussed, not least the vulnerable state of many currencies within the EC. For the continentals, however, the meeting was to be a cordial affair, in which delicate matters might be raised, but not quarrelled over. Lamont, however, was desperate, and was not disposed to be diplomatic. The French finance minister recalled his questioning as ‘without introduction and without conclusion: quick, brutal, cutting’. Four times Lamont asked Schlesinger whether he would not lower interest rates. Schlesinger, a financial grandee unaccustomed to being berated like a scullion, recalled: ‘One cannot be treated as an employee … one cannot accept it. I thought, “He is not my master … I must bring this exercise to an end.”’ In an obvious snub, he switched to Bavarian dialect in an aside to Waigel, the German finance minister, saying: ‘I think I should go now.’ It was all Waigel could do to restrain him from marching off. Lamont left empty-handed.

Worse was to follow. On 11 September, in Rome, the value of the imperilled Italian lira plummeted. Speaking on the telephone to John Major, Giuliano Amato, the warm and expansive Italian premier, had a chilling message for his British counterpart: once the traders have finished with us, they will come for you. But Major refused to devalue, just as he refused any suggestion of leaving the ERM. He was confident that his policy would survive. From Germany came the signs of a faint thaw, as Schlesinger offered to lower interest rates, should the currencies that were struggling agree to ‘realign’. This, for Major, was out of the question. For Italy, however, there was no escape, and the lira was devalued by 7 per cent. Surely this would satisfy the Germans? The response was a token 0.3 per cent cut in interest rates. European solidarity appeared to be fraying by the week. For all the public assurances offered by Major and Lamont, banks, pension funds and international companies had no doubt that the pound would depreciate. The result was one of those tragically self-fulfilling prophecies that haunt international finance, a world in which perception is often the principal reality.

Perhaps Schlesinger was still smarting from Lamont’s assault; perhaps he was simply putting the needs of his own country first. But when, on the evening of Tuesday 15 September, he suggested in an interview that the pound should have devalued along with the lira, he unleashed a cyclone. Schlesinger later protested that his remark had been offered unofficially, but it made no difference. Dawn had barely given way to sunrise on Wednesday 16 September when the feast on sterling began. George Soros, one of the more avid of the predators, recalled his conviction that ‘the Bundesbank was egging on the speculators’. In desperation, the Bank of England entered the fray, buying sterling on a colossal scale, but £1 billion was lost in minutes. The spade drove deeper, digging further into public money. The bank would have to raise interest rates; 12 per cent was agreed by Major. Perhaps he had no choice, perhaps it was the presence of Hurd, Clarke and Heseltine in Admiralty House that swayed him. All were convinced Europhiles. But the interest hike did not deceive the speculators, who saw in it only an act of desperation, and selling increased. Kenneth Clarke’s chauffeur spoke for many when he quietly said, ‘It hasn’t worked, sir.’ The politicians had been isolated from events, caught in the tragicomic position of knowing less ‘than anyone in the United Kingdom’.

Eddie George, the governor of the Bank of England, realized that ‘the game was up’. Britain had to get out. Once again, Hurd, Heseltine and Clarke, the ‘big beasts’, were summoned. Lamont desperately urged suspension, but the others overruled him. Interest rates were yanked up once more, to 15 per cent. It hadn’t worked the first time, so clearly they must try again even harder. The prime minister had mortgaged his reputation; he could not now withdraw. After a negligible rise, the pound slipped again. By the afternoon, the Bank of England had spent £15 billion in defence of sterling. Behind the scenes, the prime minister gave way. At 4 p.m., abruptly, there was silence on the trading floors as the news came that the Bank would no longer shore up the pound. The silence, one trader confirmed, lasted perhaps three seconds, before a whoop of triumph broke out. As if determined to give its audience one last flamboyant flourish, the pound dived through the bottom of the ERM. As one trader put it, ‘There was a sense of awe … that the markets could take on a central bank and win.’ Open competition had turned on its nurse.

At 7.30 p.m. on 16 September 1992, forever known as ‘Black Wednesday’, Norman Lamont announced Britain’s suspension from the ERM. It was to be a temporary measure, he assured the cameras, to be reversed when matters were ‘calmer’. The prime minister had remained uncannily composed throughout the debacle, but now he cracked. He determined to speak to Fleet Street; he wanted to reassure the chief editors that all was well and to ask them how they would present the day. But they were no more deceived than the speculators had been. Kelvin Mackenzie of the Sun genially informed him that he had ‘a big bucket of shit on my desk … and I intend pouring it all over you’. Major rallied enough to give the joshing answer, ‘Oh, you are a wag!’

A sense of collective responsibility ensured that Lamont remained, but he resigned nine months later. For all his outward protestations, he had never believed in Britain’s membership of the ERM and would remember the involvement of Heseltine, Hurd and Clarke with some bitterness. He wondered why the prime minister was spending so much time closeted with the big Europhile beasts while, as he put it, ‘we were haemorrhaging’. Major in turn insisted that since it was a question as much political as economic, the crisis was one in which the other ministers had a right to a say. For their part, the beasts felt like ‘doctors being brought in to watch the death of the patient’. In truth, there was no ready scapegoat for Black Wednesday; none could have foreseen the alacrity or skill with which the markets leapt on the stricken pound.

Lawson and Major had both accepted that sterling must be ‘pegged’ to the Deutschmark; only later did their folly become apparent. Beneath the rhetoric of mockery and outraged patriotism, the Eurosceptics were jubilant, dubbing Black Wednesday ‘White Wednesday’. Their stance had been vindicated, and by their own opponents in Europe. For amidst all the blasts and counterblasts, the quiet words of Schlesinger to Waigel were heeded. ‘In 1948,’ he said, ‘remember, we had nothing, and look at what we have now. We achieved it by pursuing our own line of policy. We mustn’t weaken now.’ Thatcher herself broke her long silence to voice her agreement. ‘I do not blame the Germans,’ she said on 8 October. ‘They have managed the new currency in exactly the way we should have managed ours. They put their country first.’ And so, despite the avowals of friendship and the appeals to solidarity, the most ardently Europhile nation on the Continent had shown that if needs be it would advance its own interests over those of the European Union. So be it, mused the Eurosceptics. Perhaps the example should be followed.

58

One’s bum year

‘There’s no such thing as Majorism,’ said Thatcher dismissively in an interview, but the jibe was unjust. Major was not a revolutionary, but the time did not require such a figure. After the withdrawal from the ERM, a ‘disaster’ from which the economy itself recovered with ease, it was felt that the Conservative party needed some peptone in its blood, which Major provided. On 8 October 1993, he gave a speech at the Conservative conference in Blackpool that came as close as any to encapsulating his view of the world.

The old values – neighbourliness, decency, courtesy – they’re still alive, they’re still the best of Britain. They haven’t changed, and yet somehow people feel embarrassed by them … It is time to return to those old core values, time to get back to basics, to self-discipline and respect for the law, to consideration for others, to accepting responsibility for yourself and your family and not shuffling off on other people and the state.

As such, it should have been unexceptionable, but Major did not foresee the reaction of the press.

It is imprudent in any government to pose as moral guardian, but the danger here was greater yet. The ‘Back to Basics’ speech was quickly construed as an appeal to some potent but hazy notion of Victorian sexual probity, despite Major’s own denials. It was unfortunate that the country in 1993 was falling prey to what Macaulay termed ‘one of its periodic fits of morality’. In this instance, the supposed fecklessness of single mothers was the object. The more right-wing members of the government openly fanned this resentment, evoking the Victorian distinction between ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor. The party that proclaimed itself a tower of rectitude was ripe for shaking.

The News of the World began the frenzy. David Mellor, a close ally of the prime minister, was discovered to be having an affair with an actress called Antonia de Sancha. Piers Morgan, then editor of the News of the World, remarked that ‘probably every Tory MP is up to some sort of sexual shenanigans’. And so it proved. In January 1994, scarcely a day passed without a Tory MP being unmasked. One vocal supporter of the ‘Back to Basics’ campaign, Tim Yeo, was found to have fathered a child outside his marriage; it was, to use the period’s most popular euphemism, a particularly egregious ‘error of judgement’. But not all the peccadilloes were sexual in their nature. Indeed, it was the fact that so many of the scandals lay in banal cases of financial impropriety that alerted Major to a disquieting truth: the press had turned against him. The Daily Telegraph, once the Tories’ sturdiest ally, was no more sympathetic to Mellor than it had been to Lamont. ‘It is not the business of the press to protect Mr Mellor’s family,’ a leader tartly observed. ‘It is Mr Mellor’s.’

1993 had been an unhappy year in every respect. The miners had successfully challenged another set of deep pit closures, but the closures went ahead anyway. The government’s probity was once more in question. That the pits closed had been the ones worked by the very miners whom Thatcher had praised during the strike of 1984 only added to the gall. Thatcher herself claimed that she would never have permitted such a betrayal.

But if 1993 was hard for the government, the previous year had been troublesome for an institution once thought unassailable. In 1992, Princess Anne divorced Captain Mark Phillips, the Duke and Duchess of York separated, Major announced the separation of Charles and Diana in the House of Commons, and Windsor Castle was devastated by fire. To these dramatic events may be added a slew of photographs, taped recordings and television revelations, all of which were damaging to the monarchy. The queen herself summed up her feelings in an after-dinner speech towards the end of the year. It had been, she said, an ‘annus horribilis’.

If the Tories under Major had stinted on bread, they had been more niggardly still in providing circuses. This was to change in 1994. The English had traditionally baulked at the idea of lotteries. Now, in the aftermath of recession, the advantages both to the nation and to the Tory party seemed obvious; all was grey, and a ‘flutter’ might provide some much-needed gaiety. It might also provide a novel source of revenue, as its critics felt bound to remark. On 7 November, John Major inaugurated the National Lottery, and with it a custom previously thought the preserve of those unfathomable continentals. And if it was, in some measure, a ‘stealth tax’, it was one that benefited the arts, the sciences and the lucky few who won.

It was in 1994, too, that the last great privatization came into force. The days had long passed when the railways were Britain’s boast. The system was complex beyond utility, the machinery archaic, the service indifferent. British Rail was seen as the last great nationalized behemoth and its privatization was trumpeted as a Thatcherite stroke against inefficiency and state planning. Less advertised was the fact that the move was in part the result of an EU directive. The result was a bewildering array of individual companies, each with supposedly discrete responsibilities. That the privatization would improve the rail service was doubted at the time, and the doubts remain. It seemed to many that Major could not get it right.

It was sadly ironic that this supremely conciliatory man should have presided over a cabinet more deeply divided than any in modern memory. Michael Portillo recalled telling Major that he and other Eurosceptics would accept even their own dismissal if unity could be achieved. He could perhaps have played Heseltine to Major’s Thatcher but did not take the role. In any case, Major assured him, he would never sack Portillo himself.

The reputation of the Tories for economic omniscience had been damaged by ‘Black Wednesday’, but there was no reason for them to despair. The recession had ended, and even ‘Tory sleaze’, the catchphrase of the time, did the Conservatives little harm. For after all, was there any alternative? The generation that remembered the Seventies was still politically alert. The Labour party represented, it seemed, a fast-vanishing constituency. The aspirant working class had long ago settled behind the Thatcherite banner, their ardour for political change dampened by affluence. If there was to be a successful counter-revolution, it would have to find its recruits elsewhere.

59

Put up or shut up

In the election of 1983, a young barrister named Anthony Blair had won the seat of Sedgefield. The man forever associated with the modernizing wing of Labour entered parliament just as the country rejected its socialist wing. As a comparative newcomer, Blair saw that there was no future in that faith, at least not for the British Labour party. It was fruitless, he felt, merely to rail against Thatcherism. The British had elected Thatcher three times, even while rather disliking her; clearly she was getting something right. Thatcherism must be understood and learned from – even, if necessary, emulated. He knew that any change in the party must be radical; pruning would not serve. Under the leadership of John Smith, he ensured that the block vote previously enjoyed by the unions should be replaced by ‘one man, one vote’. In democratizing the unions, Thatcher had demoralized them; in democratizing the Labour party at the expense of the unions, Blair sought to revivify it. It was the first of several links with Labour’s past to be snapped beyond mending.

John Smith died suddenly on 12 May 1994 of a heart attack. At once forthright and subtle, progressive and ‘right-wing’, he was universally lauded as a ‘decent man’. This is a sobriquet which tends in parliamentary circles to hint at someone ineffectual and uncharismatic, but he was sincerely mourned. Who now was to succeed him? One of the three contenders, John Prescott, put forward the choice with unusual precision. ‘The Labour party has always had a socialist and a social democratic wing. I am a socialist. Tony Blair is pleased to call himself a social democrat.’ The other candidate was Margaret Beckett, deputy leader of the Labour party and, like Prescott, of the Left. The result of the leadership election left the more cerebral Tories uneasy; Tony Blair had won, and with over 50 per cent of the vote.

The early Nineties were ready for him. The vines of Eastern Europe had withered before those of the New World, the pub had been succeeded by the wine bar, the public servant by the career politician, the celebrity by the ‘artist’, the adman by the ‘creative’. At its most extreme, right and wrong became ‘appropriate’ or ‘inappropriate’. Such curious verbal manoeuvres shadowed another movement characteristic of the time. ‘Political correctness’ was an American import. When not lampooned, it was assailed as ‘liberal fascism’, malignant and stultifying. The Guardian remarked in its defence that it seemed to be attacked ‘nine times as often as it [is] used’. In essence, it expressed what Martin Amis has called ‘the very American, and very honourable, idea, that no one should be ashamed of what they are’. Thus, ‘the disabled’ became ‘the differently abled’. While the idiom lent itself easily to satire, the principle behind it survived and even prospered. The Tories found it hard to align themselves with the new spirit. In local elections they polled only 27 per cent of the vote and lost nearly one-third of the seats they had won in 1990.

Although no formal challenge to his leadership had yet materialized, John Major knew that his authority was being undermined by the Eurosceptic right. ‘Put up or shut up’ was his message to his critics. Beneath the fighting words, however, lay the old conciliatory impulse. The Right had to be appeased. In an interview he attacked the practice of begging and encouraged the public to report it to the police. A furore ensued. The shadow housing minister, John Battle, claimed that by cutting benefits for sixteen-and seventeen-year-olds, the government was responsible for the increase in young people living on the streets. Other social problems arose in Major’s ‘classless society’. Nicholas Scott, minister of state for social security and disabled people, admitted to having authorized civil servants to assist in the drafting of a large number of amendments to the Civil Rights Bill. In addition, Scott had talked the bill out, speaking for over an hour. Several people were arrested on 29 May as disabled people protested outside Westminster. Although called upon to resign, Scott remained in office.

In Europe, the oft-repeated refrain that Britain would be ‘at the heart’ was proving difficult to sustain. In June, at a European Council meeting in Corfu, John Major vetoed the candidacy of Jean-Luc Dehaene as president of the European Commission, declaring that he objected to Dehaene’s ‘interventionist’ tendencies, and to what he had described as French and German attempts to impose their candidate on others. As the other candidates had withdrawn, this gesture was widely interpreted as sabre-rattling. Mitterrand declared that ‘Great Britain has a concept of Europe completely at odds with that held by the original six member states.’ It was an observation with which few could honestly disagree. In the UK, the use of the veto was seen as yet another genuflection before the party’s Eurosceptics. The government’s obsession with all matters European was revealed to be one that the electorate did not share. Elections to the European Parliament turned out to be spectacularly anticlimactic, with turnout a modest 36.4 per cent. In July, Major decided upon a cabinet reshuffle. Amidst other changes, he appointed a Europhile, Jeremy Hanley, to the party chairmanship and a Eurosceptic, Michael Portillo, to the post of secretary of state for employment.

The party’s various ‘sexual shenanigans’ were damaging insofar as they came in the wake of the ‘Back to Basics’ campaign; the ‘cash for questions’ scandal was another matter. This corruption was a reproach to everything upon which the British prided themselves. Two MPs were suspended for accepting money from a Sunday Times journalist posing as a businessman. Later in the year, Tim Smith and Neil Hamilton found themselves having to answer similar charges. For Hamilton in particular, the struggle to clear his name would prove protracted, bruising and finally disastrous.

Other problems remained. Northern Ireland dogged Major’s tenure, but now at last there seemed the possibility of a solution. John Major welcomed a statement by the IRA leadership that ‘there will be a complete cessation of military operations’ at midnight on 31 August 1994, but sought an assurance ‘that this is indeed intended to be a permanent renunciation of violence, that is to say, for good’. The UK government had repeatedly declared that three months free from violence was necessary to confirm any IRA commitment. This the IRA proved incapable of delivering. Indeed, the surreal alternation between the IRA’s earnest public pronouncements and its continuing campaign of violence led many to wonder whether the government’s approach held much promise of success. On 19 September, Major said that the IRA was ‘very close’ to providing assurances that its currently open-ended ceasefire would be permanent. On a visit to the United States, however, Gerry Adams appeared to undercut such optimism by saying that ‘none of us can say two or three years up the road that if the causes of conflict aren’t resolved, that another IRA leadership won’t come along’. That the two sides differed materially on the question of ‘causes’ was for the time being an insoluble conundrum.

In September, the prime minister gave a speech calling for a ‘real national effort to build an “anti-yob” culture’. This was criticized in the press as an attempt to counter Tony Blair’s declaration that he would be ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’, but such criticisms missed the mark. The ‘anti-yob’ culture was entirely of a piece with Major’s world view. He understood the temptations that poverty presents, but refused to accept that they could not be resisted.

Protests grew over the Criminal Justice and Public Order Bill. It was a fitting response to a bill which restricted the right of public protest, but it had no effect. Tony Blair was a notable signatory to the bill. The Big Issue, a magazine set up by homeless people to address homelessness, asked Blair to explain his decision. In a smog of recrimination and impasse, one small symbolic gesture shone out. The queen visited Russia, the first of her family to do so since 1917, but the Duke of Edinburgh, in a rare denial of duty, refused. As far as he was concerned, the heirs of the Bolsheviks were the heirs of those who had ‘murdered my family’.

Concerns about what had become known as ‘the environment’ came to a head in this decade. The ‘greenhouse effect’ and anthropogenic global warming had both been identified in the late Eighties, but only in the Nineties did they begin to affect policy. A Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution was established, with the aim of reducing pollution caused by motor vehicles.

In November, John Major announced that ‘preliminary talks’ with Loyalists and Sinn Féin could begin, in the light of the former’s ceasefire. But the discussions continued in tandem with further incidents. Feilim O’Hadhmaill, a lecturer at the University of Central Lancashire, was sentenced to twentyfive years’ imprisonment for having plotted an IRA bombing campaign on the UK mainland. It was a winter of problems. In December, the government was forced to back down on a proposed VAT rise after losing a parliamentary vote; the chancellor proposed increased duty on alcohol, tobacco, petrol and diesel instead.

In the meantime, the Conservatives lost the Dudley West constituency – the haemorrhage of by-elections had begun. The Common Fisheries Policy had long been one of the more contentious terms of British membership of the EU, and in January 1995, it sparked a debate in the House of Commons. Why, it was asked, did countries with no historical claim on the North Sea have rights in it? It was a running sore, but the vote was carried. The prison population had risen from 40,000 to 50,000 under the tenure of Michael Howard. A breakout was attempted at Whitemoor Prison, with five IRA members involved. Into this and related matters, the European Commission of Human Rights issued a ruling that, if upheld by the European Court of Human Rights, would remove from the home secretary the power to determine the length of time that juveniles convicted of murder should remain in prison.

Meanwhile, Europe and its discontents rumbled on. Major declared that ‘the UK should refuse to participate in a single European currency in 1996 or 1997 but might participate in 1999, subject to fresh, more stringent conditions than those already set out in the Maastricht Treaty’. On 16 February, he asserted: ‘we shall retain our border controls’. A joint framework document for Northern Ireland was at last agreed but promptly leaked. The joint framework agreement included the removal of the Republic’s claim on the six counties, but mooted a ‘north-south body’. It was to be yet another near-win for a government that was not so much ill-managed as ill-starred.

60

The moral abyss

‘A disgusting feast of filth.’ ‘Sheer, unadulterated brutalism.’ Such were among the criticisms levelled at Blasted, a new play by the playwright Sarah Kane that opened in 1995 at the Royal Court. Both author and artistic director were reportedly aghast at the press reaction. By all accounts the play was not easy to watch, but it was no harder than many other productions from the Royal Court. In this light, ‘a disgusting feast of filth’ seems hackneyed as well as overwrought and a little suspect. And so it proved. The furore that burst from the press night was nothing more than a puckish Fleet Street plot. Newspaper theatre critics had met during the interval and agreed to make this play a succès de scandale. The controversy achieved what controversies tend to achieve, with full houses and long queues at the box office.

Blasted begins with the romance between a seedy, self-destructive tabloid journalist in middle age and a frightened, stuttering girl in her twenties. It is a black comedy, but any summary of the plot must remain conjectural; we never quite know how much is to be accepted as symbolism. In the first act, we are given a nasty, tender and tortured exploration of rape and, possibly, paedophilia; in the second, a homoerotic tale of male violence. Kane herself remarked that the thematic progression from rape to war was a matter of the merest logic.

Thus was inaugurated a remarkable resurgence in new writing for the theatre, compared at the time with the arrival of kitchen sink drama or with the rise of Beckett, Stoppard and Pinter. It showed an attempt to present rather than to represent. The demolition of the ‘fourth wall’ in Victorian theatre was here taken one phase further, in an avowed desire to make us feel the action in a way that even Brecht could not have foreseen. Dialogue tended to austerity; the characters to self-absorption; staging to the unabashedly violent.

Many others followed Kane, the most celebrated of whom was Mark Ravenhill, whose Shopping and F**king explored similar questions through the prism of Nineties commercialism. This movement, in some ways peripheral, reflected the state of England at the time in a way that was not formally accurate, but strikingly suggestive. These were the dying days of an increasingly discredited Conservative government, compromised by sleaze allegations and a perceived loss of authority in economic matters.

Thatcherism was ‘in decline’, but it had left its mark, and Mark Ravenhill and Sarah Kane responded with plays that traced the broken arch over a moral abyss. The violence they invoke is often so extreme as to be unfeasible. Moreover, if these playwrights knew about genuine privation in the council estates, or war, or extreme poverty leading to extreme depravity, then their plays do not show it. But then that was never the point.

In this period, the perceived purpose of radical theatre changed subtly but deeply. The Fifties and Sixties notion of theatre ‘changing society’ had given way during the Thatcher years to the notion of play as product. Now the theatre as engine of change was lent new life, but the new direction to be offered was never clear. The ideal had a poignant charm in its utopian belief in the power of entertainers to act as prophets.

The hard dirt track of purely political theatre was unavailable to the playwrights of the Nineties. Communism had failed, morally, politically, militarily and economically; now its alternative seemed equally barren. As a consequence, the new theatre of the Nineties had no politics in any sense that a playwright of the Sixties or Seventies would have recognized.

61

A chapter of accidents

In March 1997, John Major gave a surprisingly Thatcherite verdict on the future of the ERM. ‘I do not anticipate joining [the ERM] in the lifetime of the parliament … Europe may be forced to return to … a parallel currency.’ The government meanwhile completed the sale of its remaining 40 per cent share in National Power and Powergen. It had wanted to privatize the Post Office, too, but this was a treasure too dear to the hearts of the nation to squander.

The government, in many ways so successful, was cruelly jinxed or, according to taste, mercifully frustrated. Of particular concern was the status of the ‘special relationship’ between Britain and the United States. Inevitably, perhaps, Ireland was the chief cause of friction. Major and Clinton clashed over the visit of Gerry Adams to the United States. Major wrote a letter to Bill Clinton, but little came of it. The dream of the special relationship could be sustained under Reagan, and even advanced under Bush, but the expansive Bill Clinton and the modest John Major found that they had little in common. The chief issue was once again the unwillingness of the IRA to speak unequivocally about total decommissioning. Major visited the United States, where he found the president more friendly than helpful.

On 29 April 1995, a special conference of the Labour party voted to restore Clause IV, on the need for thorough nationalization, but the new dynamic of the party could not be halted. In the following month, the Conservatives sustained their worst local council defeat in post-war electoral history. On 22 June 1995, with the flourish that he kept in reserve for crises, Major unexpectedly resigned in order to begin a leadership contest and acquire a fresh mandate. With the leadership open, he was challenged by John Redwood, a prominent Eurosceptic and right-winger. But for all his populism, he seemed too much the mandarin. In the event, Major won the leadership contest on 4 July. His mandate in the country might be withering, but the party was his once more. A further cabinet reshuffle ensued, though it did not encourage confidence. The tally of by-election defeats lengthened further, with the loss of Littleborough and Saddleworth to the Liberal Democrats.

Elsewhere, there were riots in Luton and Leeds after rumours that police had beaten up a thirteen-year-old boy. The early release of Private Lee Clegg, a British army paratrooper serving a life sentence for murder for shooting a Catholic teenager riding in a stolen car, also led to three days of rioting. It is noteworthy that the Major government, under a man whose mission had been to unite, suffered more such disturbances than its defiantly anticonsensual predecessor. In August, ‘Operation Eagle Eye’ was launched in London to crack down on mugging. Sir Paul Condon, who had claimed that 70 per cent of muggers were black, said that he expected this operation to result in the arrest of large numbers of black youths. Under the most auspicious circumstances, such a move would have been controversial, but the circumstances were anything but auspicious. Memories of the death of Jamaican-born Joy Gardner, who had died while resisting deportation, were still fresh. In a manner that was to become familiar, the three officers concerned were acquitted. Riots in the city of Bradford were one result.

Meanwhile, the withdrawal of troops continued in Northern Ireland; once again there were no further concessions from the IRA. Despite Major’s good intentions, it seemed to many that the Republicans were dictating terms. In September, the government began ‘reviewing’ its support for the European Convention on Human Rights. The ECHR had condemned the shooting of three IRA members in Gibraltar. The Convention was to prove a growing irritant to the Eurosceptic wing of the party, and even to the country as a whole. Its judgements were generally admitted to be humane and sensible, but the propriety of its attempts to overrule parliament was increasingly called into question.

In the meantime, Alan Howarth, a Tory MP, defected to Labour, citing the strengths of Tony Blair and the ‘arrogance of power’ he considered endemic in his own party; Emma Nicholson followed suit later in 1995, though she defected to the Liberal Democrats. The defections were enough to create unease that would soon sharpen into fear.

The phenomenon of ‘benefit tourism’ increasingly seized the headlines in an England where anxieties about the foreign wastrel elided easily with fears of the creeping power of the EU. The High Court ruled against two ‘benefit tourists’, saying that local authorities were not obliged to house vulnerable homeless nationals from other EU countries. Nevertheless, the Appeal Court was to rule a year later that local councils had a legal obligation to provide food and shelter for asylum seekers whose right to claim social security benefits had been withdrawn. The Queen’s Speech in November showed itself strongly tough on crime and illegal immigrants, a transparent attempt to ape and subvert the Labour party’s stated intention of being ‘tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime’. The home secretary, Michael Howard, announced new measures against bogus asylum seeking. And as if to remind the electorate of the one area in which the Tories could still claim popularity, the government lowered income tax in that year’s budget. But certain poltergeists seemed reluctant to depart the House; on the question of standards in public life, the government suffered a fifty-one-vote defeat. MPs would now have to declare what financial benefits they received from consultancy agreements.

In December 1995, at the Madrid Summit, the introduction of the ‘euro’ was announced. On majority voting and the powers of the European Parliament, the UK found itself once more isolated. The government’s overall majority was now reduced to three and it found itself defeated on the Common Fisheries Policy, but the vote had no direct effect on its policy – it no longer seemed to matter that the government was worsted so often in the Commons.

1996 seemed to bring with it some reprieve, or at least some welcome distraction. In an education debate, it was remarked that both Harriet Harman and Tony Blair, supporters of comprehensive education, had sent their children to selective and grant-maintained schools. Though this was not without precedent, it reminded the House, and the nation, of the sharply bourgeois direction taken by the party of the workers.

In February, the Scott Report was published. Set up to investigate the Arms-to-Iraq affair, it was the most extensive of its kind. There had been no need, and certainly no reason, for parliament to remain in ignorance of high-quality weaponry being sold to Iraq. In mitigation, Iraq had become the greater enemy since its days as perceived bulwark against Iranian extremism. The selling of arms to a rogue nation with which Britain had so recently been at war would have raised eyebrows but little else. As it was, the government seemed intent on obstructing the judiciary at every turn. At last, though with fierce criticism of the government’s conduct, the report established that no British arms had reached either Iraq or Iran ‘during the conflict in question’. However, the government was perceived as at once bullying and pusillanimous, and it could ill afford such a reputation.

The IRA called off its ceasefire with a bombing in London’s Docklands in which two people were killed. More bombing attempts followed, some of which were stillborn. On 15 and 18 February 1996, two other bombs were discovered. The first was defused and the second went off by accident. A hit list was subsequently discovered, including members of the royal family. In a fine display of bluster, Mitchell McLaughlin blamed the UK for ‘procrastination’ in its negotiations. Naturally enough, Gerry Adams said he knew nothing of the attack. On 5 April, the largest explosive device ever found on the mainland was discovered on Hammersmith Bridge. The IRA claimed responsibility for this, too, as it began a campaign of disruption targeting motorways and rail services as well as London’s transport system. The IRA had by no means finished with the ancient enemy.

Over the twilight of the Major years, a shooting star appeared, barely noticeable at first. It was a book, but of the sort usually read with hunched shoulders and furtive glances to the side, for it was not ‘proper’ or ‘real’ literature. Yet somehow it caught the imagination of the pensioner, the secretary, the tea lady, the manager, the magnate and the shop girl as surely as that of the pre-teens for whom it was written. Its author’s path was not smoothed by mercies. As J. K. Rowling recalled, ‘I knew nobody in the publishing world. I didn’t even know anybody who knew anybody.’

What followed had no precedent. The book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, became a phenomenon so striking that for some it altered how books were read and even understood. The plot of the saga may be swiftly summarized. Harry Potter, the half-blood son of wizards, must overcome Lord Voldemort, his parents’ killer and the would-be conqueror of the wizard realm. This realm exists adjacent to our own, but may be entered through ‘Platform nine and three-quarters’ at King’s Cross station. The plots of the individual books amount to a system of arches, with any weakness or ambiguity handed over for the next section to carry. The result is that the eyes of the reader are always straining ahead. We see elements of Cinderella, the Ugly Duckling, the schoolboy tales of Jennings, The Lord of the Rings and even Christian myth. Some beasts or characters, such as boggarts, unicorns, spectres and trolls, are familiar from folklore; others could only spring from the anxieties of the late twentieth century. Thus, we meet ‘dementors’, spirits who plunge the sufferer into a state eerily evocative of manic depression.

Critics, commentators and scholars have puzzled over the unparalleled success of the series. At one level, the cause seems clear enough: the appeal of myth does not distinguish the child from the adult. But that in itself would not account for it. Rather, in these books, an ancient theme met a still more ancient motif. There is a secret heir, whose royalty must be concealed from the world and even from himself. A uniquely English sensibility made the translation possible. Perhaps most pertinently, Harry Potter united two previously disparate strands in children’s fiction, the naturalistic and the fantastic. The first tends to show the child’s struggle for ‘self-realization’, while the fantastic depicts the child taking part in a great, even cosmic, struggle. Uncertain, idealistic and orphaned, Harry Potter is a bespectacled everyman with only the urge to do right sustaining him. The age, too, was ready. In exciting without offending, the books were impeccably Blairite. They were fun, endlessly inventive and a generation was raised with them.

The Bosnian civil war had exercised Major’s considerable energies, but to little avail. Among other leaders, he had stood out for his calmness and sense of purpose. He had drawn up a plan to reconcile the warring parties, but assumed that all would act from their best impulses. When David Owen drew up a plan for the partition of Bosnia along ethnic lines, the Serbs, in particular, would have none of it. Theirs was a world in which the Ottoman Empire was still in place. They referred to Muslim Bosnians as ‘Turks’. A prominent Serb cleric stated that the Vance-Owen plan would ‘drive the Serbs back into the hills’. It must have seemed unsettlingly redolent of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

For all its limitations, ‘Operation Irma’ proved a ‘light after dark’, as one UN official put it. Major had been appalled by the plight of Irma, a Muslim girl rendered paraplegic by a Serb bomb in Sarajevo. He ordered an airlift, and momentum gathered for a wider operation. When his government was attacked for its perceived tokenism, Douglas Hurd, the foreign secretary, said, ‘It’s better to do something for someone than nothing for anyone.’ The Major government’s decision to impose an arms embargo upon all parties equally only served to restrict the Bosniaks, who, unlike the Serbs or Croats, had no neighbours to assist them.

Sadism and violence had been unleashed at home, too, all the more shocking for their domestic setting. In Gloucester, Fred West was discovered to have buried the bodies of countless girls, including his own daughter, in various places around his house and elsewhere. He hanged himself in prison. Rosemary West, his wife, was sentenced to ten terms of life imprisonment. Their house was razed to the ground, the only conceivable commemoration.

In the BSE crisis of March 1996 may be seen the stirrings of a wider crisis, which touched on Britain’s relations with the EU and raised troubling questions of national identity. Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, or BSE, was a condition that affected cattle whose fodder had been adulterated with animal matter. The symptoms, which included erratic behaviour and loss of motor control, gave the condition the name ‘mad cow disease’. The EU acted swiftly, voting for a ban on British beef, a decision challenged by the National Farmers’ Union. Thus fell what was termed ‘a beef curtain’ across Europe, but the effects of the ban on the farmer could not be laughed away. Having insisted that ‘we cannot continue’, John Major urged a compromise, though one that required a mass slaughter of British cattle. The action was fiercely and deeply resented. Why, some asked, was the government at Westminster so bluntly indifferent to rural needs? Was Britain merely a nation of burghers? From this sense of grievance the Countryside Alliance was born, a long and near intractable thorn in the side of government.

Other divisions were evident. The armed forces minister, Nicholas Soames, informed the House that the British army would oppose any move to remove the ban on homosexuals serving in the armed forces. Four ex-service personnel planned to challenge the ban in the House of Lords, but on 9 May 1996, parliament maintained the ban, despite warning that ‘action in the European Court of Human Rights would force a change in policy within three years’. Westminster once again seemed caught between the forces of modernity and those of tradition, with no rudder to guide it beyond the ambiguous influence of Brussels. The Referendum party was one of the many manifestations of a prevailing desire to cut the Gordian knot. That party, among others, spelt more local election disasters for the Tories. And the froideur between John Major and his predecessor intensified. Some comfort for the Tories was derived from Jonathan Aitken’s exoneration of complicity in the sale of weapons to Iran.

On Saturday, 15 June 1996, the IRA ended yet another ceasefire by detonating a bomb in Manchester. As far as they were concerned, Major had broken faith in demanding the immediate decommissioning of arms. The bomb was the largest ever detonated in peacetime, yet none were killed. It appeared that this was quite deliberate; prominent buildings and government morale had been the only intended victims. The IRA had alerted the police to the bomb’s presence over an hour before the explosion: enough time to remove residents and shoppers from the vicinity. Such finesse illustrated a change: together with an undimmed readiness to use force, there seemed a new willingness to spare life.

62

The unhappy year

The winds of the time blew fitful and contrary. On 15 July 1996, the Conservatives tightened asylum legislation, in spite of an amendment proposed in the Lords. In the same month, ministerial salaries rose, with attendant protest. Industrial unrest resumed with a postal dispute and a strike of underground train drivers. British Energy was at last completely privatized, with still controversial nuclear power involved.

The House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee decided not to recommend a ban on the private ownership of guns; since a massacre had occurred at Dunblane in Scotland only a few weeks previously, the ensuing protests were as inevitable as they were extensive. The shooting of an IRA suspect in the same month only added to the unease. Restrictions on handguns were eventually tightened, but no ban ensued. John Major reaffirmed that all paramilitary activity must cease before Sinn Féin could be invited to participate in further talks. As the prospect of a general election loomed, a reduction of 1 per cent was announced in the basic rate of income tax. It was a token gesture, but the government could promise little else in the circumstances. In December, and amidst further unrest over cash for questions, the Tories lost their majority. The fragility of the government was never more obvious than in January 1997, when it brought two Conservative MPs in an ambulance to attend a vote. The same tactic had of course been employed during the Labour government’s efforts to defeat a noconfidence motion in 1979, but that was in a less squeamish era.

With the loss in February of the South Wirral seat to Labour, the government was left in a parliamentary minority. The armed forces minister, Nicholas Soames, came under pressure to resign, having admitted to ‘very serious failings’ over the MoD’s handling of Gulf War Syndrome. Nor was it a happy year for British justice. The Bridgewater Three, victims of a miscarriage of justice almost twenty years before, were at last released.

This paled beside the furore aroused by the Stephen Lawrence case. Lawrence, a black teenager, had been murdered in 1993 by a gang of five white youths. The cry of ‘What, what, nigger?’ uttered by the youths as they crossed the road to assault their victim might have hinted that the attack was racially motivated, but the police seemed curiously obtuse in that regard. That their own delay in arresting the suspects and their disregard for the testimony of the only witness – also black – might be construed as racist was another possibility to which they seemed oblivious. In a ghastly paradox, there was overwhelming evidence of racially motivated murder but almost no direct evidence against the chief suspects. The errors of procedure committed by the police suggested an attitude that was informed by prejudice. Neville Lawrence, father of Stephen, put it thus in a sombre judgement. ‘When a policeman puts his uniform on, he should forget all his prejudices. If he cannot do that, then he should not be doing the job – because that means that one part of the population is not protected from the likes of those who murdered Stephen.’ After charges against the five were thrown out, Stephen’s parents embarked upon a private prosecution in 1994, but it foundered for lack of evidence. An inquest in February concluded that Lawrence’s death represented ‘an unlawful killing in a completely unprovoked racist attack by five white youths’, but nothing came of this. It fell to the Daily Mail, not known for its championship of the oppressed, to highlight the injustice. The next day, on the front page were shown the faces of the five accused with the stark message ‘Murderers’ above. The Mail then challenged the suspects to sue, but they did not. Justice, of a sort, would be served in the years to come.

By March 1997, the government reeled rather than ruled. Yet its predicament was in some ways puzzling. There was no lack of talent, diligence or goodwill. Equally, however, there was no effective majority, too much self-defeating rhetoric and far too many scandals. A general election was called for 1 May 1997. The government’s decision, though welcomed by the other parties, was overshadowed by the continuing controversy concerning cash for questions. Allan Stewart became the latest in a long line of Conservative politicians to resign over allegations about their private lives. Piers Merchant, however, refused to resign. It seemed as if questions of guilt or innocence were long forgotten – to stitch the tattered robes of credibility with numbed and indifferent fingers was all that could be expected. When the prison ship Weare arrived in Portland Harbour, recalled to ease prison overcrowding, it seemed grimly symbolic.

The issues dominating the election were the economy, the UK’s future relationship with Europe, education, the NHS and proposed constitutional reform. On the economy the Tories had cause to congratulate themselves. Under Major, the country had seen the longest sustained economic growth in post-war history. He and his colleagues could only hope that the country would bear that success in mind. On all the other issues, Labour held the initiative. Having now styled themselves ‘New Labour’, Blair and his party found themselves subjected to a strikingly provocative advertising campaign. In one poster, the Tories depicted him with Luciferian eyes and the slogan ‘New Labour, New Danger’. Less flamboyantly, the Liberal Democrat leader, Paddy Ashdown, assured his supporters at a conference: ‘New Labour, No difference!’

In the last days of the campaign, the Tories received an unexpected windfall to their morale. On 21 April 1997, Jacques Santer, the president of the European Commission, delivered a ‘Message to the Eurosceptics’. ‘We have decided on our direction,’ he said, ‘so there is no point at all in keeping our feet on the brakes – it is even dangerous. Be constructive, not destructive. That is my message for the sceptics – wherever in Europe.’ Whether or not it was aimed at the snarling naysayers of Tory Britain, it was certainly construed in that light. Major asserted openly that the Tories had been vindicated in their reserve towards Europe, while New Labour was incandescent. Alastair Campbell suggested that someone call Santer and ask him ‘what the fuck he was playing at’. Robin Cook, shadow foreign secretary, issued a public rebuff. And the Tories, gleeful for once, released a cartoon of Tony Blair sitting on the lap of Chancellor Kohl. Was it paranoia or pooterism that led to such a storm? Mr Santer did not mention British Eurosceptics by name, and he had more proximate concerns of his own. At any rate, all political parties were publicly united in opposition to this ‘attempt to interfere’ in British politics.

In many ways, the election of May 1997 recalled that of 1979. But where the Callaghan government had contrived to find slivers of gold in the dark cave, the Major government saw only defeat. As constituency after constituency brought in its results, Tony Blair addressed the faithful. ‘You know I don’t like to be complacent,’ he announced, although his beam belied him, ‘but it’s looking pretty good.’ Indeed it was; the country had swung from Conservative to Labour by a margin of 10 per cent. For once, ‘landslide’ was apt; the government was buried beneath its own debris. Speaking of politics as ‘a rough old game’, John Major tendered his resignation as Conservative leader. Ever sanguine, he had already booked seats at the Oval for that afternoon. One party refused to take its place in the House of Commons. Sinn Féin was bound never to collude with the hated British polity. Betty Boothroyd, the Speaker, therefore issued a prohibition: since Sinn Féin had refused their seats in parliament, they would be denied their seats in the ‘Commons facilities’. It was an impeccably English response.

Major’s had been a troubled premiership, but by no means a disastrous one. Edwina Currie’s judgement that although ‘one of the nicest men ever to walk the halls of Westminster’, Major should ‘never have been prime minister’ represents the orthodoxy but not all the truth. Others thought the government successful and its leader sly, but it could not be claimed that it had been a period marked by vision. Amidst the uncertain or ephemeral achievements, one deserves commemoration: one last onslaught on the post-war consensus had been launched in 1991 in the form of the Citizen’s Charter. It had been assumed by the creators of the welfare state that those who provided state-funded services would do so with a smile; that this need not be the case was a contingency few had anticipated. Public servants were to establish charters in which their obligations to consumers would be set out. It represented a clear reversal of attitudes traditional since the Second World War, a Thatcherite initiative but one ‘with a human face’, as Major’s supporters put it.

But the face was one of which the people had tired. Major both evoked and invoked the past, whether in his ‘Back to Basics’ campaign or in quoting Orwell’s England of ‘warm beer and cricket’. Even his status as a workingclass boy made good had begun to count against him as the decade progressed. And if Major had shown that class could be discarded, Blair offered a promise of class transcended. He was, moreover, young, and his voice, emphatic and eager, seemed to carry all the certitude of youth. In place of parliamentary rhetoric, he spoke in an idiom all his own, with a blend of the company boardroom and the popular radio station. He was metropolitan to his marrow.

‘Cool Britannia’ was the watchword of this epoch. Like Harold Wilson, but for different reasons, Tony Blair sought to identify with the culture of the young. Wilson’s courting of the Beatles was not a gimmick; he recognized the value of the common touch, but he knew also that his pipe and his age were against him. For Blair, however, inviting pop stars to Downing Street was an existential statement; in the manner of middle-class public schoolboys the country over, he believed that he could become proletarian by proxy, that ownership of a guitar and cordial relations with workingclass pop stars granted him access to the world of the labouring man. A spirit of conciliation seemed to seep through his very smile, always ready to sink into a thoughtful grimace should its object fail to reciprocate. People spoke of the ‘Blair effect’. He was charismatic, clearly middle class and ‘trendy’, although it was John Prescott, the seaman’s son and well-known ‘bruiser’, who declared that ‘we are all middle class now’. When Blair came to power, many on the Continent felt in his accession the gust of a warm wind. A fluent French-speaker, Blair was more Europhile than any of his immediate predecessors and understood the sometimes blunt, sometimes byzantine, ways of the European Union. Like Major, he saw himself as the heir to Thatcher, perhaps with more reason. More than one former colleague used the word ‘messianic’ to describe him.

63

The princess leaves the fairy tale

And so came about the disappearance of a prime minister who had made far less impression on the public than most of his predecessors. Yet that year was distinguished by one shocking and tragic event in the marriage of the Prince of Wales. Charles and Diana were not the best matched of couples. He was a man of strong convictions and a stubborn streak; she had come of age with only a vague idea of what it meant to be a member of the royal family. A curious snobbery informed this ignorance. Her family regarded the German-descended Windsors as parvenus; Diana was even heard to say that she felt she had married beneath her. Nevertheless, in more formal times it could have been the model of an arranged marriage, with each going their separate ways. Their holidays were taken apart; their friends seemed to have little in common. But the public was always present, with ears pricked and eyes hungry.

It soon became apparent, to those at court, that the princess was seriously disturbed. She threw herself down the stairs and used a penknife, a lemon slicer and a razor blade against herself, while her husband carried on his principal duties of hunting and fishing. The truth was that they had nothing in common but the children, but she had the gift of intimacy. There are certain people who for a brief period represent the ideals of the nation and come to embody them. She herself acknowledged this attribute when she recognized that ‘you can make people happy, if only for a little while’. The ‘queen of people’s hearts’ was the one figure who came to represent the Eighties and Nineties, principally by first defying and then by ignoring the traditions in which she had been raised.

Diana Spencer was born in 1961 in what would have been the best of circumstances, had she not been the classic ‘third girl’ and had her parents not argued constantly until they separated in 1967, a traumatic episode that did not leave her. She was to all appearances an ordinary girl, but ordinariness can be one of the most effective disguises. She was talkative, with a marked tendency to giggle, but she was enormously afraid of the dark. When her father suggested that she should be dispatched to a boarding school, she is supposed to have said, ‘If you love me, you won’t leave me.’

She failed her O levels and in the same period began to suffer from bulimia, but she also began a series of meetings and encounters that began to suggest what a royal marriage might entail. The ears and eyes of the public grew larger. The queen herself played no part in guiding or advising the young couple, although by Diana’s own account, the publicly unresponsive Prince Philip did. It seems that destiny or, in this instance, fate, was to make its own progress.

The narrative of the next few years has been retold a thousand times. ‘The pack’ were at her heels, chasing every move she made. In a mood of deep despondency, she told her sisters that marriage would not be possible. ‘Bad luck,’ they said. ‘Your face is on the tea towels.’ It was on the mugs too, with ‘my prince’, as she called him, supporting Diana with one arm, and her head cocked at an angle. Her reception within the palace elicited feelings of anxiety and betrayal, while her loneliness was compounded by disappointment. It has been said that while a man fears a woman’s future, a woman fears a man’s past; and so it proved in this instance. Another love still held sway over the prince. There were confidential interviews with ‘friends’, and books, authorized or unauthorized. ‘I never thought it would end up like this,’ she told one friend. ‘How could I have got it all so wrong?’ Their separation was announced in the early months of 1996, and their divorce soon after.

An impulsive and unselfconscious person, Diana rarely calculated the effects of her actions on others, but nothing could have averted the final disaster. She was in Paris with her companion, Dodi Fayed, when they entered the Pont de l’Alma road tunnel and their speeding car crashed. At four in the morning of 31 August 1997, she was declared dead. The press took a morsel every hour, as if watching the collapse of a stock market. At one point, Diana was struggling, at another she was said to be recovering. The nation awoke to news of her death.

Her death released a torrent of tears. These were shed for her smile, for her work with the victims of AIDS and of landmines, for her status as a free spirit and wronged wife. And inevitably she was mourned in mythic terms, as fearless martyr and sacrificial lamb. The shock of her demise in Paris was compounded by the fact that her two young sons were still in England; her former husband hardly seemed to enter the nation’s sorrow. Her relative youth was one cause of dismay, but it was her sudden and brutal absence that provoked the greater mourning. Something seemed to have torn out the heart of Britain, recognized even in the overwhelming wave of grief that dominated the days after her death.

It soon seemed as if England had become moist in mind as well as in soul; some universities began to include ‘Diana studies’ on their curriculum. When the singer Elton John adapted his song ‘Candle in the Wind’ to celebrate Diana, the nation bought the record by the million. So promiscuous an outpouring of grief inevitably provoked satire. A cartoon in Private Eye showed a frightened householder being menaced by two men in dark glasses with the reproach ‘We have reason to believe you haven’t bought “Candle in the Wind”.’

It was Blair who coined the expression ‘the people’s princess’; it may be that he saw himself in the role of ‘people’s prince’. But for all the later calumnies, New Labour was not a one-man show. At the apex of the new government stood a triumvirate of equals. Blair brought his charm and Brown his brain and his industry, while Peter Mandelson offered his skills as a strategist. He became known as ‘the Prince of Darkness’, but the jibe was as frivolous as it was unjust. Like many in the new government, he had abandoned the strict socialism of his youth only with intense misgivings. Mediating the ‘message’, as it became known, was Alastair Campbell, Blair’s press officer. He had been editor of the Daily Mirror, and the knowledge accrued there served him and the government well. Under his auspices, ministerial pronouncements became subject to strict censorship; to be ‘on message’ was all.

Having clawed at its cage for eighteen years, Labour bounded out with teeth bared. If the economy seemed serviceable, little else did. Haste was needed. Under Gordon Brown, the Bank of England was permitted to set its own exchange rates, a concession that effectively granted it independence. It was a move widely praised, even in the Tory press. The government also sought to discard the image of Labour as the party of the cloth cap, backward-looking and aggressively masculine, by bringing 101 female MPs into parliament. The jibe of ‘Blair’s babes’ soon acquired currency, though the term was swiftly dropped. Its mocking successor, ‘Tony’s Cronies’, would take longer to exorcise.

For Blair, Europe represented a wound that would turn septic if not addressed. Major had opted out of the Social Chapter. Blair accordingly opted in, accepting the Maastricht Treaty in all its fullness. Signs of future conflict were nevertheless apparent when, after a particularly difficult set of discussions, the normally ebullient prime minister offered the bleak observation ‘We can’t do business like this.’ With such an imposing majority, Blair could perhaps afford some latitude in respect of parliamentary procedure. In a move widely seen as presidential, he reduced the amount of time allowed for Prime Minister’s Questions. There was, he assured everyone, too much to be done.

Devolution for Scotland and Wales had long been on the new movement’s agenda. ‘Central knows best’ had been the damning slogan ascribed to the Tory administrations of the past decade; such an impression of arrogance must be avoided at all costs. Therefore, and in another break from the party’s roots, unity would now encompass diversity. In 1997 the government announced referenda on the question of devolution. The Scots had been chafing for some such concession for years, while the Welsh, having spent the best part of two millennia in a struggle with the English, were more blasé. Scotland was given back its parliament, and Wales was offered an assembly.

These were the halcyon days for the government. Even airy talk of a political ‘third way’, under which New Labour would inaugurate an era of apolitical politics and harness capitalism to serve the common good, found eager listeners. The twin extremes of trade union hegemony and unfettered monetarism were alike disposable. ‘Socialism’, as Blair put it, was the new watchword. There was nothing original to this initiative, but it proved a useful soundbite.

In the spring of 1998, the spirit of devolution took a new turn. It was determined that a new London Assembly should be set up, at once a nod to the former Greater London Council and a rebuff to its connotations. Ken Livingstone was not deterred by the fact that his name lay at the root of those connotations. After much internal wrangling, he was expelled from the Labour party for running against Frank Dobson, the official Labour candidate for Mayor of London. Blair had warned against Livingstone, saying: ‘I can’t think of Ken Livingstone without thinking of Labour’s wilderness years … I think he would be a disaster for London.’ Livingstone went on to prove that the New Labour consensus was not universally shared. Speaking as the newly elected Mayor of London, he began, ‘As I was saying, before I was so rudely interrupted sixteen years ago …’

Blair’s government developed a taste for what came to be known as ‘humanitarian intervention’, one of the more revealing euphemisms of the period. Robin Cook, the foreign secretary, had spoken of Labour conducting ‘an ethical foreign policy’, but how could such a policy be maintained? There can be little doubt that some of the causes selected were deserving. Under Slobodan Milosevic, Serbia had already made itself a pariah during the Bosnian civil war. Its subsequent repression of the largely Albanian province of Kosovo led in 1999 to a bombing campaign sponsored by Britain. This had the effect of forcing a Serbian withdrawal but also of imbuing the Serbs with something like the spirit of the Blitz. In Belgrade, posters were unveiled that alluded to this irony. ‘We’re following your example’ was their message.

Less obviously ‘ethical’ was Britain’s support for George W. Bush’s bombing of Iraq in 1998. In Sierra Leone, too, the British government intervened; violent rebels had threatened the legitimate government, not to mention vital British interests. Perhaps as a result of this injection of realpolitik, the British venture was successful, but this ‘humanitarian’ approach to military action divided conservatives and socialists alike. The question of the propriety of invading another nation because one disapproved of its rulers was one that did not deter the new administration. If a minority was oppressed, they were right in every respect, and come what may.

Legislation throve in those fecund years. The Human Rights Act of 1998 was passed and thus the European Convention on Human Rights became ‘native’. The National Minimum Wage Act, passed in the same year, was opposed by Tories on the grounds that it would lead to unemployment. It did not, and this failed prophecy did little for the Conservatives’ reputation. Welsh and Scottish devolution brought about another, unintended, change. Blair was fond of invoking ‘the British people’, but with the reassertion of Celtic identity came something like a crisis of Englishness. The West Lothian question remained; it was an anomaly and, some said, an injustice. The Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish MPs were allowed to vote in the British parliament on purely English affairs.

The matter of the euro had bedevilled the government of John Major. Publicly, Blair expressed himself in favour of the currency, but his chancellor was less enthusiastic and proclaimed five ‘tests’ for Britain’s entry into the eurozone. The crucial ones were whether economic convergence with other European nations could be achieved, and were they flexible enough? The answers remained doubtful, and therefore the euro was rejected. Gordon Brown’s Five Tests, it is worth noting, were Thatcherite in inspiration. Despite this, the Tories affected scorn as their response.

It cannot be doubted that in one respect Labour fell short. Where the Tories had been able to mine a rich and colourful seam of scandal, involving sexual indiscretion, bribery and perversion, New Labour could offer only a dusty bundle of financial improprieties. There were some exceptions, of course. In January 1998, the son of the home secretary Jack Straw received a police caution after admitting to possession of cannabis. Straw himself had recently declared that he would not support the drug’s legalization. Most scandals, however, were of the ‘Geoffrey Robinson’ type. Robinson, the Paymaster General, was accused by the Conservatives of hypocrisy after it was revealed that he had failed to register an offshore trust, having abolished tax relief on savings over £50,000. It was a dreary effort. The revelation that Robin Cook had been conducting an affair was more tragic than comic. Meanwhile, the Conservatives under William Hague set new procedures for the election of the party leader; whereas the decision had rested solely with the parliamentary party, the new rules gave all party members the vote, which inevitably led to a swing to the right.

The problem of restricted opportunity had to be addressed and so the welfare-to-work scheme was launched, intended to lift the unemployed out of welfare dependency. In a similar spirit, the March 1998 budget promised ‘work for those who can, security for those who can’t’. Behind the soundbite lay nothing that Thatcher herself would not have approved. However, disaffection still flourished. In the spring, 200,000 joined the Countryside Alliance on a march on London. The Alliance had arisen partly as a response to a private member’s bill to outlaw hunting with hounds, but also to the government’s perceived indifference to the concerns of the countryside. There were to be many such public protests during the Blair tenure. The Alliance rarely won its battles, yet its very existence was an omen. The old divide between the metropolis and the land was to become not narrower but wider in succeeding years.

In September 1998, foreign affairs remained to the fore. The government confirmed that it would grant full UK citizenship to 100,000 citizens of the remaining British dependencies. Asylum applications were shown to have risen by 6,000. In a small but resonant echo of the new influx of women to parliament, Marylebone Cricket Club voted to admit women to its membership. At so early a stage, any government would be obliged to pour out a stream of promises; nonetheless, such announcements were evidence at least of excellent intentions.

1999 was as frenetic a year as its predecessor. In January, Paddy Ashdown stepped down as leader of the Liberal Democrats. Robin Cook’s ex-wife wrote a book, serialized in The Times, in which she wrote of his having felt that he had ‘sold his soul to the devil’ by abandoning his socialist principles in favour of the Blair regime. Buckingham Palace announced the engagement of Prince Edward to Sophie Rhys-Jones, photographs of whom frequently showed her in poses and styles reminiscent of the late Princess of Wales.

The decline of manufacturing gathered pace, with The Economist reporting that manufacturing employment was 57,000 lower in July than in February 1996, the biggest single loss being British Steel’s decision to shed up to 10,000 jobs. The last tin mine closed, at South Crofty, thus ending 3,000 years of tin mining in Cornwall. It was reopened in 2001, having been bought by a Welsh mining engineer, and was once again Europe’s only remaining working tin mine. Crofty aside, the mining industry in England could boast of no amelioration. The Annesley-Bentinck coal mine, the oldest in the UK, was closed. Elsewhere, too, the signs were bleak. Fujitsu announced it was to close its Newton Aycliffe semiconductor plant. The TUC urged the government to take ‘remedial action’. Blair was sympathetic but made clear that he could not help the ‘twists and turns’ of world markets, instead promising to ‘help the hurt’.

For those with eyes to see, some modest gains were apparent. British Aerospace took over the Marconi defence electronics arm of the GEC, becoming Europe’s biggest defence and aerospace company. Signs of progress emerged elsewhere, too. The government again voted to lower the age of sexual consent for homosexuals. Other liberal measures were assured of a similar progress. The death penalty was formally abolished for all offences, in accordance with Protocol 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

In February 1999, the Macpherson Report on the Stephen Lawrence case was published. The report became famous for its controversial use of the term ‘institutional racism’ to describe the workings of the Metropolitan Police, though a close reading of the report reveals something more circumspect:

It is vital to stress that neither academic debate nor the evidence presented to us leads us to say or conclude that an accusation that institutional racism exists in the MPS [Metropolitan Police Service] implies that the policies of the MPS are racist. No such evidence is before us … It is in the implementation of policies and in the words and actions of officers acting together that racism may become apparent.

The expression referred to a culture in which even black officers were by their own admission often complicit. Clearly something had floated up between the cracks of policy.

The government suffered three defeats in the House of Lords over plans to abolish the hereditary component of the upper chamber. Blair himself expressed a certain affection for the sanctuary of ermine and scarlet, but remarked, ‘I just don’t see what it’s got to do with Britain today.’ The House of Lords Act of 1999 reduced the number of hereditary peers to ninety-one; thus the great reform of the upper house was at last achieved. But if Blair or his successors imagined that an elected house would be more pliable than a hereditary one, they were quickly disabused.

Nonetheless, many born to privilege were tottering. Jonathan Aitken, whose hubristic lawsuit against the Guardian newspaper had backfired, was forced to plead guilty in 1999 to two charges of perjury. Accused of corruption by both the Guardian and World in Action, he had sued them, armed with imprudent clichés about the ‘sword of truth’, before the sword duly turned on him. Like Oscar Wilde, he went to jail and wrote a ballad, and, like Profumo, he began a lifetime of penitence.

Social amelioration proceeded apace. A £60 million government campaign to halve the incidence of under-eighteen pregnancies by 2010 was announced; single mothers must be protected, but underage pregnancies avoided. Somehow, a Cromwellian politics could coexist with cavalier liberty. Like Margaret Thatcher, Blair wanted a Britain that would suit his own personality.

Much that was odd or wayward died in this time, though much of the same strand was born. Screaming Lord Sutch of the Monster Raving Loony party gave up his anarchic ghost. And yet a Carnival against Capitalism broke out in the heart of capitalism itself, the City of London. It was, by later standards, a happy affair, with a spoof edition of the Evening Standard, the Evading Standard, printed and circulated. In similarly quixotic fashion, Tony Blair announced his bill to ban hunting with hounds in July 1999, as the Countryside Alliance had predicted, even though they could not have foreseen the forum for that announcement, on the television programme Question Time. It was also a busy month for relations with the Continent. The European Commission formally lifted its ban on beef imports from Britain. The great matter of Europe impinged in other respects. Forty, mainly religious, independent schools confirmed that they would appeal to the European Court of Human Rights against legislation banning corporal punishment in all UK schools. The irony of such an appeal was lost on them.

In December 1999, the Good Friday Agreement, signed in 1998, came into force. For thirty years, the Troubles had blighted Northern Ireland; over 4,000 lives had been lost. How could a tourniquet to the bloodletting be applied? Somehow, irreconcilable demands must be respected and met. Under the government of John Major, a ‘three-strand’ solution to the problems of the Province had been mooted. Under Blair, this was now implemented. The central suggestion was radical indeed. Northern Ireland would remain a part of the United Kingdom, but only for as long as the majority of its citizens wished it so. The ‘Good Friday Agreement’, as it became known, would not have been possible without careful movements in the wings of power. Two taoiseachs, three prime ministers, a president of the United States and the leaders of both the nationalist and Unionist communities of Northern Ireland all brought about the conditions for a devolved Assembly and Executive, for ‘north-south’ cooperation between the north and the Republic, and for ‘east-west’ cooperation across the Irish Sea.

It almost collapsed. Deadlines for agreement came and went. Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist party wanted nothing to do with the whole affair. It was made acidly clear to the prime minister that his presence was needed if any sort of deal was to be reached. ‘This is not the time for soundbites,’ he declared before setting out. ‘Let’s leave them at home. I feel the hand of history on our shoulders.’ He was much mocked at the time, yet after only three days the warring parties laid down their fears, prejudices and hatreds. The Republic gave up its constitutional claim to the six counties, while England repealed the act of 1920 that had formally divided the island. While both nations therefore retained their interests in the affairs of the Province, they had in a sense withdrawn from it.

Blair was perhaps more fortunate than his predecessors. His allies and delegates were more emollient; he inherited happier conditions; above all, the Province longed for air, as the referenda on the agreement made plain. And Blair was obviously sincere in his desire for a settlement that would benefit all. In the end, only the Democratic Unionist party refused to accept the treaty, and the overmastering pull of peace drew the scattered filings together. The agreement was to undergo many vicissitudes in the new millennium. For much of its first decade it was suspended due to disagreements over policing and decommissioning. There were inevitable casualties. David Trimble, the hard-bitten leader of the Ulster Unionist party, had committed his followers to the agreement on the understanding that the IRA would surrender its weapons, and, when it did not, he and others like him were obliged to cede place and power to more radical elements. In England, the news was received with a blend of hope and weariness – most had grown wary of the ‘new beginnings’ promised in breathless headlines. For those who cared, Northern Ireland had been retained for the Union, but on entirely new grounds. The future of the Province now rested with the people of Northern Ireland rather than with the parliament of the United Kingdom. In constitutional terms nothing of substance had changed, except for the underlying principle.

The land of prophecies and dreams was silent as the new millennium approached. The only prophecy to exercise public concern was dismally prosaic; it was rumoured that a ‘millennium bug’ would cause computer software to collapse unless it could be aligned with the coming date, but the problem was largely resolved in advance. And so England awaited the new age much as it always had. It may be that the quiet revolution of Blairism had assuaged what longing there had been for change. Despite its roaring for flesh, the English lion is often content with a simple bone.

Still, the millennium had to be marked somehow, and its central image was to be the Millennium Dome. Intended to recall a vast and imposing spaceship, it seemed to many a giant, bloated beetle. It had, in fact, been the brainchild of the previous government: Michael Heseltine had seen an opportunity to reclaim toxic land in Greenwich.

British politics seemed to have come to an end. Postwar dogma had been replaced by Thatcherite dogma. This new orthodoxy was massaged under Blair, but any changes were cosmetic. The once mighty Liberal vote had retreated, and the party itself renamed as the Liberal Democrats, though each of its new leaders assured the nation that they were still a force to be reckoned with. By early 2000, polls revealed that Blair’s reputation for trustworthiness stood at 46 per cent, no small achievement for an incumbent prime minister. It might have been higher had his promises not proved difficult to fulfil.

After years of Thatcherism, a more ‘progressive’ mood could be detected. In 1997, the British Social Attitudes study recorded that 75 per cent of the people said they favoured tax rises for public service improvements. Polls revealed a populace far less exercised than it is now by questions of ethnicity. Concern about immigration lay at 3 per cent in 1997, while interest in foreign affairs stood at 2 per cent. Asylum seekers and economic migrants were no longer a bugbear. The wealth divide grew, although all incomes rose. A benignly self-centred nation emerged.

The Nineties have been called the decade of ‘spin’, but the novelty lay in the prominence of the spin doctors, who had taken the place of trade union leaders as the most important national figures outside government. The collapse in voter turnout reflected a government adept at soothing the populace; as a result, parliamentary discourse acquired the attributes of a patois: ‘tackle’, ‘raft’, ‘package’, ‘deliver’ and the suggestive ‘meaningful’. Is it uncharitable to suggest that when John Major left Downing Street, he took the English language with him? It may be that he took pragmatism with him, too. He could not match the wild-eyed millenarianism of his predecessor, while Blair was nothing if not a believer. ‘The eyes of the world’, ‘the hand of history’, ‘the right thing to do’: resonant banalities of this sort were his demesne, and for five years they worked.

And so, with many bangs and flashes of fireworks, the twentieth century ended. No bug had bitten, no rapture had occurred, and the frost added glitter to the great white marquee. In accordance with the spirit of the time, the Dome enshrined the future. Yet the past seems to gain in allure as modernity cloys. It may be that as the millennium progresses, the English will recover what was once their glory in that most precious and fugitive of instincts: a capacity for awe.

The End

Footnote

1. The sun never rises

* This is a history of England, rather than of Britain. However, British institutions, such as the British army, navy, government, monarchy and empire, are constantly referred to in this book, as they are inextricably bound up with England’s history. For the same reason, certain events which took place in the wider United Kingdom are also covered.

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——, Britain since 1900: A Success Story? (London, 2014)

Smith, S. B., Diana: The Life of a Troubled Princess (London, 1999)

Stevenson, J., British Society, 1914–45 (London, 1984)

——, & Cook, C., The Slump: Society and Politics during the Depression (London, 1977)

Stewart, M., The Jekyll and Hyde Years: Politics and Economic Policy since 1964 (London, 1977)

Strange, J.-M., TwentiethCentury Britain: Economic, Cultural and Social Change (Harlow, 2007)

Sykes, A., Tariff Reform in British Politics: 1903–1913 (Oxford, 1979)

Symons, J., The Thirties: A Dream Revolved (London, 1960)

——, Between the Wars: Britain in Photographs (London, 1972)

Taylor, A. J. P., The Origins of the Second World War (London, 1961)

——, The First World War: An Illustrated History (London, 1963)

——, English History, 1914–1945 (Oxford, 1965)

——, The Second World War: An Illustrated History (Harmondsworth, 1976)

Taylor, C., Return to Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village in the Twenty-First Century (London, 2006)

Taylor, D. J., Orwell: The Life (London, 2003)

——, Bright Young People: The Rise and Fall of a Generation, 1918–1940 (London, 2007)

Thompson, F. M. L. (ed.), The Cambridge Social History of Britain 1750–1950 (vol. 1. Regions and Communities; vol. 2. People and Their Environment; vol. 3. Social Agencies and Institutions) (Cambridge, 1990)

Thomson, D., England in the Twentieth Century, 1914–63 (Harmondsworth, 1965)

Thorpe, D. R., Alec Douglas-Home (London, 1996)

Tiratsoo, N., From Blitz to Blair: A New History of Britain Since 1939 (London, 1997)

Todd, S., The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class, 1910–2010 (London, 2014)

Tomlinson, J., Problems of British Economic Policy, 1870–1945 (London, 1981)

——, Employment Policy: The Crucial Years 1939–1955 (Oxford, 1987)

Turner, A. W., Rejoice, Rejoice! Britain in the 1980s (London, 2010)

——, A Classless Society: Britain in the 1990s (London, 2013)

Vincent, D., Poor Citizens: The State and the Poor in TwentiethCentury Britain (London, 1991)

Vinen, R., Thatcher’s Britain: The Politics and Social Upheaval of the Thatcher Era (London, 2009)

Vital, D., The Making of British Foreign Policy (London, 1968)

Walton, J. K., The British Seaside: Holidays and Resorts in the Twentieth Century (Manchester, 2000)

Wells, H. G., Mr Britling Sees It Through (London, 1916)

Williamson, P., National Crisis and National Government: British Politics, the Economy and Empire, 1926–1932 (Cambridge, 1992)

Wilson, J., C.B.: A life of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman (London, 1973)

Wilson, T., The Downfall of the Liberal Party, 1914–1935 (London, 1966)

Winterton (Earl), Pre-War (London, 1932)

——, Orders of the Day (London, 1953)

Woodham, J. M., TwentiethCentury Design (Oxford, 1997)

Woodward, E. L., Short Journey (London, 1942)

Young, J. W., Britain and European Unity, 1945–1992 (Basingstoke, 1993)

Youngson, A. J., The British Economy: 1920–1957 (London, 1960)

Ziegler, P., Wilson: The Authorised Life of Lord Wilson of Rievaulx (London, 1993)

Zweiniger-Bargielowska, I., Women in TwentiethCentury Britain (Harlow, 2001)

ARTICLES

Articles relating to twentiethcentury English history published in the following journals:

Cambridge Historical Journal (London, 1923–57)

English Historical Review (London, 1886–)

Historical Journal (Cambridge, 1958)

History (London, 1912–)

Journal of British Studies (Chicago, 1961)

Past & Present (Oxford, 1952–)

Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (London, 1872–)

Index

abortion, ref1

Abyssinia: Italian invasion (1935), ref1, ref2, ref3; emperor in exile, ref1

ACAS (Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service), ref1

Acton, Lord, ref1

Adam and the Ants, ref1

Adams, Gerry, ref1, ref2, ref3

Adenauer, Konrad, ref1, ref2

advertising, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5

Africa, colonization, ref1

agriculture: wages, ref1; depression, ref1; Chamberlain’s measures, ref1; BSE crisis, ref1

Aitken, Jonathan, ref1, ref2, ref3

Alamein battles (1942), ref1

alcohol: effects, ref1; cocktails, ref1; beer, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6

Aldington, Richard, ref1

Alfie (film), ref1

Aliens Act (1905), ref1

Amato, Giuliano, ref1

American: slang, ref1, ref2; music, ref1

Amery, Leo, ref1

Amiens, Battle of (1918), ref1

Amin, Idi, ref1

Amis, Kingsley, ref1, ref2, ref3; Lucky Jim, ref1

Amis, Martin, ref1

Amos, Baroness, ref1

Amritsar massacre (1919), ref1, ref2

anarchists, ref1, ref2

Anderson, Tryphena, ref1

Andropov, Yuri, ref1

Anglo-Irish Agreement (1985), ref1, ref2

Anglo-Irish treaty (1921), ref1

Anglo-Russian convention (1907), ref1

Animals, the, ref1, ref2

Anne, Princess, ref1

Annual Register, ref1

Anti-Comintern Pact, ref1

Antonescu, Ion, ref1

appeasement, ref1

Arab–Israeli war (1973), ref1, ref2

architecture: suburban, ref1; Sixties, ref1

Argentina: fugitive Germans, ref1; Falklands war, ref1

aristocracy: political parties, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5; landholding, ref1, ref2; establishment, ref1; Lords reform, ref1; new, ref1; in decline, ref1; sporting role, ref1

army: condition of troops, ref1, ref2; ‘Curragh Mutiny’, ref1; troop numbers, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; volunteers, ref1, ref2, ref3; equipment, ref1, ref2, ref3; Western Front losses, ref1; conscription, ref1, ref2; officer class, ref1; conscription (1939), ref1; jokes about inactivity, ref1; demobs, ref1; ban on homosexuals issue, ref1

Arras, Battle of (1917), ref1

arts: modernism, ref1; Sixties, ref1; psychedelic, ref1; response to Thatcher, ref1, ref2; government spending, ref1

Ashdown, Paddy, ref1, ref2, ref3

Asquith, Herbert Henry: relationship with C-B, ref1; chancellor, ref1; administration, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; background and character, ref1, ref2; drinking, ref1, ref2; career, ref1, ref2; speeches, ref1; religion, ref1; marriage, ref1; election (January 1910), ref1; Lords reform, ref1; on death of Edward VII, ref1; George V’s view of, ref1; response to strikes (1910–11), ref1; response to suffragettes, ref1; third Irish Home Rule Bill (1912), ref1, ref2, ref3; on Law, ref1, ref2, ref3; dealing with Ulster Protestants, ref1; doubts Dardanelles strategy, ref1; loss of reputation, ref1; coalition leader, ref1; view of conscription, ref1; war strategy, ref1; response to Easter Rising (1916), ref1; Irish Home Rule plan (1916), ref1; forced out by Lloyd George, ref1; support for women’s suffrage, ref1; post-war Liberal party leadership, ref1, ref2; loses seat (1918), ref1; on Black and Tans, ref1; election results (1923), ref1; suggests Labour minority government, ref1; relationship with Labour government, ref1; election defeat (1924), ref1; replaced by Lloyd George (1926), ref1

Asquith, Margot (Tennant), ref1

Astaire, Fred, ref1

asylum seekers: local councils’ obligation to, ref1; legislation, ref1, ref2; rise in number, ref1; not a concern, ref1

Atlantic Conveyor, SS, ref1

Attlee, Clement: background, ref1; view of MacDonald’s administration, ref1, ref2; Labour leadership, ref1, ref2; election results (1935), ref1; on Munich Agreement, ref1; illness, ref1; response to coalition proposal, ref1; prime minister (1945), ref1; appearance and character, ref1; cabinet, ref1; on rationing, ref1; on Britain’s financial position, ref1; calls second general election, ref1; education policy, ref1; on Macmillan, ref1

Auden, W. H., ref1

Auschwitz, death camp, ref1, ref2

Austria: German population, ref1; British policy, ref1, ref2; German incorporation, ref1; massacre of Jews, ref1

Austria-Hungary, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5

Awdry, Wilbert and Christopher: Thomas the Tank Engine series, ref1

Baden-Powell, Robert: career, ref1; Scouting for Boys, ref1

Baker, Kenneth, ref1

Baldwin, Oliver, ref1

Baldwin, Stanley: on People’s Budget, ref1; background, ref1, ref2; career, ref1; on new MPs (1918), ref1; on Lloyd George, ref1, ref2, ref3; on 1922 election, ref1; chancellor, ref1; Conservative leadership, ref1, ref2; conversion to protectionism, ref1, ref2; view of Labour minority government, ref1; election campaign (1924), ref1; election victory (1924), ref1; appearance and character, ref1, ref2, ref3; vision of a harmonious England, ref1; on class consciousness, ref1; relationship with son, ref1; opinion of Churchill, ref1; broadcasts, ref1; miners’ strike intervention, ref1; general strike (1926), ref1, ref2; housing policy, ref1; cultivating suburban lower middle class, ref1, ref2; general election campaign (1929), ref1; election results (1929), ref1, ref2; in National Government, ref1, ref2; view of new industries, ref1; view of continental affairs, ref1, ref2; policy towards League of Nations, ref1, ref2; opinion of Hitler, ref1; old age, ref1, ref2; military spending, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; fear of another war, ref1; response to remilitarization of Rhineland, ref1; threatens to resign over Edward VIII’s marriage, ref1, ref2; retirement, ref1; on dangers of bombing, ref1

Balfour, Arthur James: on death of Victoria, ref1; A Defence of Philosophic Doubt, ref1; character, ref1, ref2; administration, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6; protectionism issue, ref1, ref2; defeat at 1906 election, ref1; leadership, ref1; relationship with C-B, ref1; People’s Budget crisis, ref1; speeding offences, ref1; view of suffragettes, ref1; resignation of leadership, ref1; in coalition cabinet, ref1, ref2; view of conscription, ref1; Ulster home-rule plan, ref1; foreign secretary, ref1, ref2; view of Lloyd George, ref1

Bane, Mary, ref1

Bank of England: gold reserves, ref1, ref2; using gold reserves to support sterling, ref1; ‘Socialization of Industries’, ref1; supporting sterling, ref1, ref2; unable to support sterling, ref1; setting exchange rates, ref1

Barber, Tony, ref1

Battle, John, ref1

Beatles: background, ref1, ref2; in Hamburg, ref1; recordings, ref1; Beatlemania, ref1; relationship with Stones, ref1; MBEs, ref1, ref2; US and Philippines tour, ref1; writing, ref1; Sgt. Pepper, ref1; press attitude to, ref1; status, ref1

Beaverbrook, Lord (Max Aitken): relationship with Lloyd George, ref1; campaign to replace Baldwin, ref1; support for Baldwin, ref1; support for Edward VIII, ref1

Beckett, Margaret, ref1

Belfast parliament, ref1, ref2

Belgium: African colonies, ref1; German invasion (1914), ref1; BEF, ref1; German invasion (1940), ref1, ref2; abdication of king, ref1

Belgrade, bombing, ref1

Bell, Julian, ref1, ref2

Benn, Tony: on technology, ref1; hostility to European project, ref1, ref2; economic views, ref1, ref2; on Belgrano sinking, ref1; support for miners, ref1

Bennett, Alan, ref1

Bennett, Arnold, ref1, ref2

Bentine, Michael, ref1

Berlin Wall, fall (1989), ref1

Berry, Chuck, ref1

Betjeman, John, ref1

Bevan, Aneurin: appearance and character, ref1; minister of health and housing, ref1; on free medical care, ref1; memories of childhood, ref1; establishing NHS, ref1; resignation over prescription charges, ref1; vision of welfare state, ref1; relationship with Foot, ref1, ref2; nuclear policy, ref1

Beveridge, Sir William, ref1, ref2

Bevin, Ernest, ref1, ref2

Beyond the Fringe (stage revue), ref1, ref2

Biba, ref1

Bicknell, Dr Franklin, ref1

bicycles, ref1, ref2

Big Issue, ref1

Black and Tans, ref1

Black Wednesday (1992), ref1, ref2, ref3

Blair, Tony: career, ref1; leadership election (1994), ref1; ‘tough on crime’, ref1; policy on right to protest, ref1; children’s schooling, ref1; election (1997), ref1; appearance and character, ref1, ref2, ref3; opt-in to Social Chapter, ref1; Good Friday Agreement, ref1; reputation for trustworthiness, ref1

Blake, Peter: Self-Portrait with Badges, ref1

Blake, William, ref1

Bloomsbury Group, ref1

Blunden, Edmund, ref1, ref2

Boer War, Second (1899–1902), ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6

Boers: concentration camps, ref1; self-government, ref1

Bondfield, Margaret, ref1

Boothroyd, Betty, ref1

Borisov, German massacre of Jews, ref1

Bosnian civil war, ref1

Bottomley, Horatio, ref1

Bow, Clara, ref1

Boy Scout Movement, ref1, ref2, ref3

Bridgewater Three, ref1

Brierley, Walter: Means-Test Man, ref1

bright young things, ref1, ref2

Brighton, Grand Hotel bombing (1984), ref1

Bristol: docks bombed, ref1; riots (1980), ref1

Britain: ‘civilizing mission’, ref1, ref2; population, ref1; immigration, ref1; imports, ref1; ‘Greater Britain’ plan, ref1, ref2; threat from Germany, ref1, ref2; car accidents, ref1; Versailles Treaty, ref1; industrial activity, ref1; naval agreement with Germany, ref1; war with Germany (1939), ref1; response to invasion of Poland, ref1; German air attacks (1940), ref1; Hitler’s invasion plans, ref1; Battle of (1940), ref1; VE day, ref1; welfare legislation, ref1; consuming society, ref1; hydrogen bomb, ref1; ‘special relationship’ with US, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; EEC negotiations, ref1, ref2, ref3; devaluation (1967), ref1; sovereignty, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5; joins EEC, ref1; EEC referendum (1975), ref1; Falklands war (1982), ref1; ERM membership, ref1, ref2; death of Diana, Princess of Wales, ref1

British Aerospace, ref1

British Boundary Commission (1925), ref1

British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), ref1, ref2, ref3

British Empire Exhibition (1924–25), ref1

British Expeditionary Force (BEF): assembled (1914), ref1; retreat (1940), ref1, ref2; Dunkirk rescue, ref1

British Gas Corporation, ref1

British Gazette, ref1

British Medical Association (BMA), ref1

British National Party, ref1

British Rail, ref1

British Social Attitudes, ref1

British Steel, ref1

British Union of Fascists (BUF), ref1

Brittain, Vera, ref1

Brown, George: view of Common Market, ref1; voluntary incomes policy, ref1; character, ref1; loses seat (1970), ref1

Brown, Gordon, ref1, ref2

Bryson, Bill, ref1

BSE crisis, ref1

Buchenwald survivor, ref1

Bulganin, Nikolai, ref1

Bulgaria, ref1, ref2

Burgess, Anthony: A Clockwork Orange, ref1, ref2

Burgess, Guy, ref1

Burns, John, ref1, ref2

Burton, Richard, ref1

buses, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6

Bush, George, ref1, ref2

Bush, George W., ref1

Butler, R. A. (Rab), ref1, ref2, ref3

Butlin, Billy, ref1

Caine, Michael, ref1, ref2, ref3

Calder Hall nuclear power station, ref1, ref2

Callaghan, James: home secretary, ref1; opposition to ‘In Place of Strife’, ref1; sends troops to Northern Ireland, ref1; indifference to referendum, ref1; Wilson’s resignation, ref1, ref2; Labour leadership, ref1; IMF negotiations, ref1; tribute to Wilson, ref1; economic policy, ref1; on disruption of society, ref1; monarchist, ref1; pay policy, ref1; ‘Winter of Discontent’, ref1; appearance, ref1; message for unions, ref1

Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), ref1

Campbell, Alastair, ref1, ref2

Campbell-Bannerman, Sir Henry (C-B): election victory (1906), ref1, ref2, ref3; appearance and character, ref1; relationship with Balfour, ref1; relationship with Lloyd George, ref1, ref2; death, ref1

Canada, industry, ref1

cannabis, ref1, ref2

capital punishment, ref1, ref2

Carlyle, Thomas, ref1

Carr, Robert, ref1

Carson, Edward: Ulster Unionist leadership, ref1; relationship with Law, ref1, ref2; Irish Home Rule issue, ref1; coalition cabinet, ref1; response to Easter Rising executions, ref1; Irish Home Rule plan, ref1; supports Lloyd George, ref1; at Admiralty, ref1; threatens civil war, ref1

Cash, Sir Bill, ref1

Castle, Barbara, ref1, ref2

Cat and Mouse Act, ref1

Central Electricity Board, ref1

Central LandOwners Association, ref1

Central Powers, ref1

Chalmers Watson, Mona, ref1

Chamberlain, Austen: on strikes (1911), ref1; on Ireland, ref1; in coalition cabinet, ref1; chancellor, ref1; party leader, ref1, ref2; Law’s government, ref1; foreign secretary, ref1; gloom, ref1

Chamberlain, Joseph: background and character, ref1, ref2, ref3; opposition to Irish Home Rule, ref1, ref2; plan for the empire, ref1, ref2; Boer War policy, ref1; Tariff Reform programme, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5; US relationship, ref1; influence, ref1, ref2, ref3; retirement, ref1

Chamberlain, Neville: elected (1918), ref1; career, ref1, ref2; view of Labour minority government, ref1; minister of health, ref1; welfare proposals, ref1; appearance and character, ref1, ref2; opinion of Churchill, ref1; general strike (1926), ref1; election results (1929), ref1; in National Government, ref1; chancellor, ref1, ref2, ref3; protectionist measures, ref1; on unemployment, ref1; view of continental affairs, ref1, ref2; opinion of Hitler, ref1; reduces defence spending, ref1; view of Edward VIII, ref1; advice to Edward VIII, ref1; premiership, ref1; approach to European diplomacy, ref1; appeasement policy, ref1, ref2; relationship with Mussolini, ref1, ref2; protest on Germany’s incorporation of Austria, ref1; Czechoslovakia policy, ref1; discussions with Hitler, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; broadcast to the nation, ref1; Munich Agreement, ref1; preparations for war, ref1; recognition of Franco’s government, ref1; Rome talks, ref1; pledges support for Poland, ref1; negotiations on Danzig, ref1; ultimatum to Germany, ref1; Commons assault on, ref1; resignation, ref1, ref2

Chanel, Coco, ref1

Channel Islands, German occupation, ref1

Channel Tunnel, ref1

Channon, Henry ‘Chips’, ref1

Chaplin, Charlie, ref1, ref2; Modern Times, ref1

Charles, Prince, ref1, ref2

chemical industry, ref1

Chernenko, Konstantin, ref1

Chesterton, G. K., ref1

Children Act (1908), ref1

Children’s Salvage Group, ref1

Choltitz, General von, ref1

Christie, Agatha, ref1

Church of England, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

Churchill, Lord Randolph, ref1, ref2, ref3

Churchill, Winston: on Edward VII, ref1; on Joseph Chamberlain, ref1, ref2; on Asquith, ref1; Board of Trade appointment, ref1, ref2; background, character and career, ref1; relationship with Lloyd George, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; ‘People’s Budget’ crisis, ref1; suggests abolition of Lords, ref1; home secretary, ref1, ref2; response to strikes (1910–11), ref1, ref2; response to suffragettes, ref1; on Conservative Irish policy, ref1; on outbreak of WWI, ref1; First Lord of the Admiralty, ref1, ref2; Dardanelles strategy, ref1, ref2; demoted, ref1; Law’s view of, ref1; on Lloyd George seizing power, ref1; minister of munitions, ref1; coalition Liberal position, ref1; rejoins Conservative party, ref1; chancellor, ref1; return to gold standard, ref1, ref2; reduces supertax, ref1; increases public spending, ref1; opinion of Chamberlain, ref1; actions during general strike (1926), ref1, ref2; tax relief for mortgage payments, ref1; election results (1929), ref1; defence spending, ref1; opinion of Mussolini, ref1, ref2; opinion of Nazism, ref1; opinion of Hitler, ref1; opinion of Baldwin, ref1; views on India, ref1; opinion of Gandhi, ref1; isolated in Commons, ref1; response to remilitarization of Rhineland, ref1; on abdication crisis, ref1; warns Chamberlain about Hitler, ref1; concern about Chamberlain’s advisers, ref1; view of appeasement policy, ref1; on Czechoslovakia, ref1; on Munich Agreement, ref1; on Russian involvement, ref1; prime minister and minister for defence, ref1, ref2; forms coalition war cabinet (1940), ref1; ‘blood, toil, tears and sweat’ speech, ref1; on German advance, ref1, ref2; election campaign (1945), ref1, ref2; on nationalization, ref1; retirement, ref1; on Suez crisis, ref1; on hydrogen bomb, ref1