Chichester

For the last three months or so, I've been spending my Tuesdays at the University of Chichester, where I've been teaching a course on post-War British culture. Today was the last session.

It's been enormous fun. I'm extremely grateful to a splendid group of students for making me feel welcome, and to Hugo Frey - the head of the History department - for inviting me in the first place. I think I'm going back next year, when I trust it will be a pleasure all over again.

Still angry after all these years

A week on, and millions of words having been devoted to the subject, is there anything left unsaid about the late Margaret Thatcher? More pertinently to me right now, is there anything else I want to say about her, given that I've written well over 100,000 words about her and her influence?

Well, here's one thought that I haven't seen expressed. She was born in 1925. That puts her smack in the middle of the Angry Young Men generation of the 1950s. Kingsley Amis and John Braine were born in 1922, Alan Sillitoe in 1928 and John Osborne in 1929.

The archetypal Angry Young Man in fiction is a lower-middle class, provincial, grammar-school educated, Oxbridge graduate who marries above his social station and rails against the establishment and the old boy network. Which sounds familiar, somehow.

In 1977 Kingsley Amis had dinner with Thatcher and wrote to Philip Larkin about his impressions of her: 'I thought her bright and tough and nice, and by God she doesn't half hate lefties. All in all a tonic.'

Margaret Thatcher

To mark the passing of Margaret Thatcher, here’s an extract from my book Crisis? What Crisis? Britain in the 1970s:

With Keith Joseph ruling himself out of the running, even before the race had started, Thatcher decided to rule herself in, on the grounds that ‘someone who represents our viewpoint has to stand’. In November 1974 she announced that she would be challenging Edward Heath for the leadership of the Conservative Party.

She was not an obvious choice, partly because she, following Joseph, had begun to espouse the unfashionable cause of monetarism, and partly because the policies she had pursued in her previous incarnation as education secretary under Heath had led to her being dubbed by the Sun ‘the most unpopular woman in Britain’. In retrospect, given the controversy she subsequently attracted, this was something of an overstatement. Her supposed offence was absurdly innocuous – under pressure from the Treasury, the statutory provision of free milk for schoolchildren was ended on her watch – but the tabloid sobriquet ‘Margaret Thatcher, Milk Snatcher’ had a pleasing enough ring, and it lingered long in the memory.

An entry in Kenneth Williams’s diary in January 1972 captured some of the reaction to her time at education, as well as offering a foretaste of future protests: ‘There were barriers at Downing Street and mounted police. It depressed me very much. The bawling long-haired youths shouting “Thatcher Out!” and carrying coffins expressing sentiments like “Maggie Dead” etc was the spectacle of only another form of fascism.’

Mostly, though, Thatcher was an improbable candidate for the simple reason that she was a woman. That was, for the media, the overriding issue, and coverage of her tended to be couched in terms of her appearance, with a particular focus on her headwear. When she was education secretary, the Sunday Telegraph had described her as being ‘sometimes rather pretentious and given to the smart hat and neat pearls favoured by suburban ladies coming to Tory conferences for the first time’, and the image still dominated the declaration of her candidacy.

‘Try to forget her plummy voice and her extravagant hats and her Dresden-shepherdess appearance,’ advised the Daily Mirror. ‘She is the toughest member of the Shadow Cabinet, and even if she doesn’t win the battle for the Tory leadership she may yet be responsible for bringing down Ted Heath.’ But even Enoch Powell, who had as good a claim as any to be her trailblazer, had trouble forgetting these things, insisting that the Tories couldn’t possibly elect her: ‘They wouldn’t put up with those hats and that accent,’ he shuddered. It was an image of which she was well aware, describing herself defiantly as ‘a middle-aged lady who likes hats’.

It was noticeable that when she did emerge as Heath’s successor, in February 1975, it was the handful of women Labour MPs who were the first to celebrate the achievement. ‘I am very pleased,’ said Gwyneth Dunwoody, while Joyce Butler went further: ‘Absolutely splendid. I am delighted. It is time we had women in the top jobs.’ And Shirley Williams added, ‘I cannot help admitting privately, as a woman, being pleased to see that in the Tory Party, of all parties, a woman has broken through.’

Thatcher’s victory in the 1975 leadership contest was no great endorsement of monetarism. Indeed it is doubtful how many of those who voted for her in the first ballot (when she defeated Heath), let alone in the second, when she saw off all other challengers, understood or believed her deeply held, if newly acquired, convictions on economics. The support was instead predicated on her courage in volunteering to bell the cat: ‘She’s the only man among them,’ was the phrase going around Westminster.

‘Suddenly Mrs Thatcher stands out among the Tory dwarfs like a life-size Snow White,’ editorialized the Daily Mirror before the first ballot. ‘A very tough Snow White.’ But it warned that if she became leader, the Conservatives would be taking on an image that was ‘Dominatingly middle-class. Suburban. Anti-union. Even more Southern English than it is now.’ It was precisely this image that excited those who sought hope in Thatcher’s election. The Daily Mail leader column that welcomed her arrival put it in the context of the great enemy of the right: ‘The majority of the British people do not want socialism. They do not want Bennery.’ The only question was whether this bold experiment of having a female leader might misfire and inadvertently hand the future to Tony Benn.

 

Nearly Classless

Yesterday I submitted the revised text for my forthcoming book, A Classless Society: Britain in the 1990s. Doesn't mean it's quite finished yet, but it's nearly there, two years after I submited the first proposal. It's very long.

Quote for the Week

Good to hear a UKIP supporter on Radio Five Live this morning explaining that the party spoke for the silent majority who weren't being listened to.

Gay Marriage: the European Connection

I really like Christopher Booker's column in the Sunday Telegraph. I'm always impressed by his ability to see pretty much everything that's wrong with the world as being a manifestation of one of his long-ridden hobby-horses.

So it was something of a disappointment to find this week that not even he had managed to link gay marriage with wind farms. Some comfort could be found, however, by discovering that instead it's all about Europe, as explained in Gay Marriage: the French Connection. The reason the government is so concerned to introduce this legislation, according to Booker, is that if it hadn't done so voluntarily, it would soon be forced into the measure by the European Court of Human Rights.

I'm not so sure. It seems to me that the main reason why David Cameron, George Osborne, Boris Johnson and the rest of the modernising wing of the Conservative Party are so keen to bring in a pro-homosexual piece of legislation has more to do with the fact that it was their party that made gay rights such an issue quarter of a century ago.

Back then, there were plenty of Tories who loathed the liberalism associated with the 1960s, the chain of changes that had been made in the first government of Harold Wilson, including the legalisation of abortion and male homosexuality, the ending of capital punishment and censorship of the stage, the restraint of racism, and the relaxation of the divorce procedure. In that chain, homosexuality seemed to be the weak link. And why? Because of the hysteria over AIDS, which many on the right saw as a heaven-sent opportunity to mount an assault on the legacy of the '60s.

And so a concerted campaign was launched that had at its centre the passing of Section 28 of the Local Government Act in 1988. The intention was to make homosexuality unacceptable. 'I think Clause 28 will help outlaw it and the rest will be done by AIDS, with a substantial number of homosexuals dying of AIDS,' said the Leicester MP Peter Bruinvels. 'I think that’s the best way.'

This wasn't simply a political operation, but one in which the police joined with great enthusiasm. 1988 also saw a greater number of convictions and cautions for indecency and soliciting by gay men than there had been since the mid-1950s, when male homosexuality was illegal. (This was at the time when James Anderton, the chief constable of Greater Manchester, was talking about gay men 'swirling around in a human cesspit of their own making'.)

There were plenty in the press keen to lend their voices too: 'active homosexuals are potential murderers,' according to George Gale in the Daily Express; 'the act of buggery kills.' And then there was the usual chorus of religious leaders, including the prime minister's favourite, the Chief Rabbi Immanuel Jakobovits: 'AIDS is the consequence of marital infidelity, premarital adventures, sexual deviation and social irresponsibility – putting pleasure before duty and discipline.'

The public response suggested that this was a campaign that might be successful. In the last years of the 1980s, the British Social Attitudes survey showed an increase in the proportion of the population who believed homosexual relationships to be always or mostly wrong, rising from 62 per cent to 74 per cent in the space of five years. It did, for a short while, seem possible that the liberalising trend evident for two decades could be reversed. In one of her last speeches as prime minister, Margaret Thatcher talked about 'the waning fashions of the permissive 1960s'.

She spoke too soon. A fightback, defending social liberalism and seeking to advance it still further, was mounted, primarily on a cultural front, as discussed in my essay Things Can Only Get Bitter (and as explored in considerably greater depth in my forthcoming book, A Classless Society). The result was to leave the Tories looking like the 'nasty party'.

For the current Conservative leadership, this is the legacy they've been left with. It's pointless for those on the right of the party to insist that this isn't an important enough issue when the country's facing years of economic stagnation. It was they, and their predecessors, who made it an issue, not Cameron. He's simply trying to discard the hand he was dealt.

But there is one area where I think Booker gets it right. Because there is a connection with Europe. Just not neccesarily the one he identifies.

In 1994 an amendment to the Criminal Justice Bill was proposed by Conservative MP Edwina Currie that would see the homosexual age of consent reduced from twenty-one (as it then was) to sixteen, the same as that for heterosexuals. Her initiative outraged many in her party. 'What Mrs Currie is seeking to do is to get this House to vote to legalise the buggery of adolescent men,' thundered the Northampton MP Tony Marlow.

Currie's proposal was rejected by the Commons, and a compromise was passed instead that reduced the age to eighteen. Even that was too far for some, and a number of Tory MPs voted against any change in the law at all. What was intriguing was the correlation between voting on this issue and the tendency towards Euroscepticism.

The big question of the time had been the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty, introduced by John Major, but opposed by many of his backbenchers, who staged a series of rebellions in Commons votes. When it came to the question of reducing the age of homosexual consent to eighteen, a majority of Conservative MPs supported the measure: 169 voted for, 134 against. But of the 45 MPs who had rebelled against Maastricht, an overwhelming majority (32 of the 45) voted against any reduction at all. The same phenomenon could be observed in the press, where it was writers on the most Eurosceptic papers who argued against changing the law.

Quite why there should be such a strong overlap between Euroscepticism and opponents of gay rights is surely a question that Christopher Booker could profitably explore.

What we missed in 1992

I've enthused on here before both about Bryan Gould and about the Inane Ramblings of a History Graduate blog. I'm very happy, therefore, to see the two come together in a counterfactual account of what Britain might have been like had the Labour Party made the right decision in 1992 and chosen Gould as leader, rather than John Smith.

It's great stuff, and I don't think I disagree with any of the conclusions. In particular, I can't argue with the idea that a Gould-led Labour government from 1997 would have been so much more progressive than how things actually turned out. And I particularly like the idea that the Millennium Dome project would have been cancelled in favour of a decent fireworks display. That would have been sufficient.

Please don't call me Reg (it's not my name)

I still find it a little disconcerting when Radio 4 news programmes pretend to be interested in popular music. But there they were again today, passing on the fact that Reg Presley of the Troggs has died.

Presley was one of the very best rock stars we ever had. And the Troggs were the subject of the first piece of rock history I ever had published in a book - I wrote the entry for the Rough Guide to Rock, back in the 1990s. That was three decades on from their chart career, but they were a band that made more sense as time went on.

Primitive even by the standards of 1960s garage rock, they really came into their own when the Ramones turned up, doing much the same thing: stripping pop music down to its essential components and forging new songs from the same basic three chords. Which is why their Live at Max's Kansas City album, recorded in the late 1970s, is one of the really great live albums. Not quite at the same level as Jerry Lee Lewis Live at the Star Club, Hamburg, of course, but then nothing is. Maybe somewhere around the Modern Lovers Live.

And they were, at that stage, still capable of coming up with new classics, even if the public weren't paying much attention. The 1973 single Strange Movies, about porn films, is one of their finest records. It's trumped only by the magnificent Night of the Long Grass, from 1967, when it was assumed to have drug connotations. It didn't, of course. 'None of us were drug-mad,' observed guitarist Chris Britton. 'We had enough trouble with beer and scotch.' Instead, Night of the Long Grass was a buccolic dream about sex, just as most of Reg's songs were.

Similarly, I always thought that Love Is All Around wasn't an anthem about hippy dippy love, but rather Reg trying to get off with a woman by pleading that free love was the norm these days: 'If you really love me, come on and let it show.'

In fact, he only really had the one subject, did Reg. And on stage he was a wonderfully lascivious figure, while the Troggs were a joyously liberating force of nature.

This photograph was taken by Harry Goodwin and comes from My Generation: The Glory Years of British Rock.

Death and a Toe-rag

The death of a celebrity is seldom the occasion of any personal reminiscences on my part, since I don't know any celebrities. At least, not as the term is commonly understood. The fact that in 1998 I conducted what I believe was the last ever interview given by Johnny Moore of the Drifters means a great deal to me, though I suspect his name rarely troubles the lips of the 3 A.M. Girls.

I did, however, encounter Michael Winner, whose death has just been announced.

A few years ago, one of the murder dinner parties that I write for Paul Lamond Games called for the inclusion of a DVD, and Winner was booked as the guest star.

He behaved like an arse, making a loud, complaining entrance, even though it was apparent that we in the middle of a take with the main actor in the piece. He also proved to be a completely dreadful actor. He did, though, deliver the lines as written. And it gave me some pleasure to hear him doing several takes of a very brief script which included him dismissing one of the characters with the epithet: 'Toe-rag.'

Happily, we don't have DVDs in these games anymore. So your chances of buying one and inadvertently encountering the ghost of Mr Winner over dinner are greatly diminished.

Parish Notices

Things were supposed to get easier once I'd submitted the manuscript of my book on the 1990s, but as it turns out, everything's still a bit hectic.

Apart from my proper work (the stuff that pays a living wage), I've been engaged this week on various things that will emerge over the next couple of months. In chronological order, then, here's some notes for my diary:

On Saturday lunchtime, I'll be in Islington for Crunch the News, along with people who are younger, funnier and cleverer than I am: Helen Lewis, Nadia Kamil, Josie Long and John Luke Roberts.

On Friday 15 March I'll be doing a talk at Glamourama!, an event being staged in connection with the Glam exhibition at the Tate Liverpool.

And at some as yet undetermined point, I'll be on the fine television show Flog It with Paul Martin, talking about the work of Harry Hammond. Incidentally, the exhibition of Harry's work is still on at the V&A, where I gave a lunchtime lecture last week. My thanks to Bryony Smith, who invited me to speak there.

Quote for the Week

'What's the fellow's name? Rees-Davies? Reis-Davies? You know, on The Times.'
'Rees-Mogg?' said Brooke.
'Mogg, that's it. Mogg. I knew it was something foreign. Dear God. It's the thin end of the wedge when you find a fellow called Mogg editing The Times. I ask you. Is a fellow called Mogg likely to inspire confidence in the pound? Can you imagine nations trembling at the thunderings of a person called Mogg? Same with everything these days. BBC, C of E, MCC. They've all sold out. Nowadays it's all demonstrations, anarchy, pornography. Galloping paralysis, that's what it is.'
- Graham Lord, The Spider and the Fly (1974)

Slight Return

It's been a month since I was last on this blog, but it hasn't been pure idleness on my part. Yesterday I submitted the text of my book on Britain in the 1990s, which I started writing in February. It's the longest thing I've ever written, and I've lost track of whether it works as a book or not, but I think some of it is alright.

I'll have a break from it now, and then come back in a spirit of hope that it might be okay.

Meanwhile, I'm enormously flattered to find that on the always excellent Brandish site, there's a list of fifteen people who are going to be influential in tech, style, sport and politics in 2013 and there, amidst genuine stars like Carl Jenkinson, Chuka Umanna and Jake Bugg, I find my own name. That's extraordinary. In a state of some bewilderment that I should be included in such company, I offer my thanks to Brandish.

On a completely unrelated note, I also wanted to record my radio highlight of the year: the appearance of Stan Stennett on the Today programme. I spoke with Stan when I was researching my book on Terry Nation and he's terrific value: one of the last survivors of the great generation of comedians who came out of ENSA in the 1940s.

Hearing him on the radio was wonderful, but even better was hearing him do a joke about being the driver for Ivy Benson's band: 'It wasn't much money,' he explained, 'but it was all I could afford.'

My main task over the next few months is to educate a class of students at Chichester University so that they appreciate those references.