Hurrah hurrah for England: A review of Who Dares Wins by Dominic Sandbrook

You have to be well over the average age of a British citizen today – 39, and thus born in 1980 – to remember the 1970s. If, as Auden wrote, the Thirties was a low dishonest decade, then the Seventies was a dreary and depressing one. Music, fashion, architecture, politics and the economy were all rather dismal. Governments of soft Left and soft Right vied to manage post-imperial decline, while the over-mighty trades unions presided over endless damaging strikes. Joining the Common Market or EEC (later the EC, now the EU) in 1972, confirmed by referendum in 1975, signally failed to improve matters.

Musically, the Seventies began with the dissolution of the Beatles and ended in a shower of punkish saliva. However, as Dominic Sandbrook points out in Who Dares Wins, his magisterial history of the three momentous years from 1979-1982 (Allen Lane, £35), green shoots were visible in the garden of pop. Janus-like, at the dawn of the new era, stood Gary Numan’s Tubeway Army, whose “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?” stunned the 10 million viewers of Top of the Pops on 24 May 1979. The sci-fi lyrics – the ‘Friend’ was an android prostitute – combined with relentless electronica, turned pop’s face to the future, escaping from a hopelessly disaffected past.

In Covent Garden, the Blitz club fostered extravagant costumes among its regulars. As David Johnson wrote in the Evening Standard:

“Hammer Horror met Rank Starlet… lads in breeches and frilly shirts, white stockings and ballet pumps, girls as Left Bank whores or stiletto-heeled vamps dressed for cocktails in a Berlin cabaret, wicked witches, kohl-eyed ghouls, futuristic man-machines.”

Other Blitz regulars included Gary Kemp and mates, who soon burst upon the world as Spandau Ballet – “openly poseur, stridently elitist” as Kemp’s friend Robert Elms wrote in The Face, itself a lively rebuke to the older music press like the NME and Melody Maker. Spandau Ballet, Duran Duran, Soft Cell and many other synth-led bands were soon categorised as New Romantics.

Escapism was the New Romantics’ leitmotif, and there was plenty to escape from in 1979, particularly the public service strikes that left rubbish uncollected, the dead unburied and urban Britain under a blanket of filth. The electorate blamed Labour and the union bosses and turned instead to the Tories under Margaret Thatcher – untested, largely unknown, but promising a change from the unambitious corporatism that had characterised recent governments.

Who Dares Wins takes its title from the motto of the Special Air Service (SAS), whose successful storming of the Iranian embassy on 5 May 1980 was another, loud signal that Britain was emerging from a long and depressing fog. It appeared on prime-time television (the BBC had to interrupt the snooker final to broadcast the assault), and was seen round the world. At the time I was working for an American company, and there was an immediate change of attitude towards Britain among my colleagues: suddenly the Brits, traditionally seen in the US as pompous and spineless, re-invented themselves as a warrior race. In Britain, the SAS coup was widely applauded, though of course deprecated by the left and their friends in the media.

The resolution of the siege came a few days after the first anniversary of Mrs Thatcher’s election victory, and in the midst of a row over the size of Britain’s contribution to the EC budget. She had just turned down the offer of a one-off £775 million rebate, and had set her mind on the much larger and permanent rebate, which she finally achieved in 1984. But Mrs T already sensed victory. She told Jimmy Young on Radio 2 that our EC partners were calling her the “she de Gaulle”: the achievement of her first year in power was that “Britain really does count on the world scene”.

If you have read Charles Moore’s biography of Mrs Thatcher, you will find much that is familiar in Sandbrook’s 940 pages. Though it is sometimes difficult to disentangle the tale of these three years from the Prime Minister’s struggles with her own party and the wider British establishment, the author succeeds triumphantly. The thematic chapters efficiently weave together the painful evolution of British society that, with benefit of hindsight, we can see began to emerge during the first three years of Margaret Thatcher’s rule. But it was not so evident at the time.

A list of chapter topics illustrates the scope: Thatcher takes power; female empowerment; Thatcher’s struggles with the cabinet “wets”; food; economic reform and unemployment; Europe; monetarism; football hooliganism; the right to buy; recession; pop music; British Leyland; lifestyle politics; the SDP; CND; beating inflation; the march for jobs; snooker and darts; racism and riots; Tony Benn and the battle for Labour’s soul; Ulster; Livingstone and the GLC; IRA hunger strikes; Diana and the Sloane Rangers; sporting heroes; the passing of traditional working class life; and, of course, the Falklands War.

Margaret Thatcher arrived in Downing Street determined to control inflation, reduce borrowing, cut public spending, increase productivity and promote individual initiative. She felt she represented the strivers, the small business people she regarded as the backbone of the British people. She was not altogether sure how she was going to turn the ship of state around, and had to work with a largely “wet” cabinet whose instincts were not far removed from those of right-wing Labour. But she had some key allies: Sir Keith Joseph, John Nott, and above all Sir Geoffrey Howe, who, despite his eeyoreish manner, was a notably dry Chancellor of the Exchequer, whose determination to balance the books sometimes exceeded the Prime Minister’s.

The government’s chosen instrument was monetarism: squeezing the supply of money, while cutting spending and forcing Britain’s many inefficient industries to smarten up or die. There were to be no more bail-outs. The medicine was painful.

When she came to power, inflation was at 13 per cent and unemployment was 1.5 million; both were rising. The UK was vulnerable to the recession sweeping the industrial world, and Howe’s raising of interest rates strengthened the pound, damaged exports and led to a surge in imports. By August 1980 unemployment hit 2 million. GDP had fallen by 2 per cent and manufacturing output by 8.7 per cent, with a further 6 percent drop in 1981. Over these three years British manufacturing capacity dropped by 25 per cent.

The catastrophic surge in unemployment was concentrated in Scotland, northern England, the Midlands and Wales. Communities whose entire raison d’etre and sense of themselves depended on the industries around which they had grown up, in some cases for 200 years, found they had neither a present nor, seemingly, a future. Hundreds of thousands of middle-aged and older men had little chance of finding decent new jobs. Naturally, the Labour Party and the TUC were virulently opposed – though some Labour politicians privately conceded that strong medicine was needed – but Thatcher’s immediate problem was with her cabinet. Sir Ian Gilmour, Jim Prior and Francis Pym were the most powerful of the wets, but most of the cabinet at one time or another argued for a return to the days of fudge, subsidy and avoidance of economic reality.

But Margaret Thatcher, despite her well-documented private misgivings, had come into politics to change British life for the better, and she was determined to push through the policies she was convinced in the end would make the British people more prosperous and above all, more free. However, she was losing the propaganda war and got precious little support from her officials. Her adviser, Peter Cropper, nailed the problem in a memo:

“We started out by displaying the bareness of the cupboard and emphasising the size of the job. But we must constantly remember that leadership, which is what we were elected to provide, consists largely in cheering people up, making them laugh, and keeping them that way.”

It’s unclear how much people were cheered by Mrs Thatcher’s frequent forthright speeches, especially in these early years. But Sandbrook stresses the many improvements to daily life, most of which would probably have come along anyway, but which as time went on were available to more Britons thanks to increased prosperity.

Home computers became popular in the early 1980s, with Sinclair, Acorn and the BBC Micro being the leading British brands. Primitive by modern standards, they nevertheless made the UK the world’s biggest home computer market. And this was one area where Margaret Thatcher was prepared to intervene to support British research and development.

Her one early political success was the Housing Act 1980, which enabled council tenants to buy their homes, and which was immensely popular. It also brought in much-needed revenue to the exchequer. Of course, it was detested by the Left, and in the long run the failure of successive governments to replace sold-off housing stock has contributed to the 21st-century housing crisis.

Looking back after four decades, it is easy to underestimate the difficulties besetting Mrs Thatcher at new year 1982. Some indicators were turning positive – inflation fell below 10 per cent in January 1982 and would drop to 4 per cent by the end of the year – but it didn’t feel that way. Unemployment passed three million in March, and would go higher yet. But then Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands.

The government had not seen this coming, and in fact Mrs Thatcher had signed off massive defence cuts which would have fallen disproportionately on the Royal Navy’s surface fleet. Luckily for her, and for the nation, the cuts had not yet been implemented. The story of the Falklands War has been often told, but Sandbrook relates it concisely and well here. It is good to be reminded that the Labour leader Michael Foot supported the Prime Minister, and that Labour MPs, who in those days were largely drawn from the patriotic working class, were staunch in defence of British liberties. Rather more staunch, in fact, than many Tory MPs.

Sandbrook is particularly good on the personal pressure felt by Mrs Thatcher. She knew it was right to respond strongly to the Argentine dictatorship’s aggression, but she was unfamiliar with the realities of war. She was well advised by her defence chiefs and by some of her cabinet, especially Willie Whitelaw, who had won an MC serving in the Scots Guards in Normandy. When her men began dying, Denis Thatcher, also a WW2 veteran, put his arm round his weeping wife, and explained: “This is what happens in war, love.”

Contrary to her reputation for implacability, Thatcher was actually prepared to come to an arrangement with Buenos Aires in order to avoid bloodshed. But the murderous Argentine junta, led by the drunken General Galtieri, was unable to respond. The die was cast with the sinking of the cruiser Belgrano, and the deaths of 326 Argentine sailors, followed the next day by the destruction of HMS Sheffield and the deaths of 20 of her crew, the first of several warships to be sunk by French Exocet missiles.

Over the next six weeks, the British forces displayed great skill and endurance. The fighting was savage, especially in the assaults by British troops on the rocky hills blocking the approach to Port Stanley. There was great bravery – not all of it on the British side – and in the end the right side won. But Sandbrook shows that it was a closer run thing than the British press painted it at the time. The bonus was that the wretched Argentine junta fell three days after the surrender at Stanley, leading to the restoration of democracy.

Like her SAS troopers in Knightsbridge two years earlier, the Prime Minister had dared, and won. The Falklands campaign united the British in a way that would have seemed scarcely possible a few months before. It transformed Mrs Thatcher’s reputation at home and abroad, and set the stage for her overwhelming victory at the 1983 general election and the further reforms for which she is now best remembered.

Among his many sources, Sandbrook refers extensively to Alas Alas For England, published in 1981 by my father Louis Heren. After a decade as deputy editor of the Times, following a quarter century as a foreign correspondent, he set out to explore why and how the country had got into the political, economic and social quagmire that Mrs Thatcher wanted to sort out. The politicians and civil servants that he canvassed all shared a reluctant defeatism. He ended his tour talking to Jim Callaghan, and the two agreed that, in the long run, British common sense and goodwill would triumph. Although in 1981 he could not foresee the earthquake that Thatcherism would bring to British life, it is a fact that this natural Labour man, a devotee of Attlee and Bevin, voted for Mrs Thatcher three times.

It is tempting to look for parallels between the Falklands and Brexit. Both episodes tapped into the profound patriotic instincts of the British, especially the working class, and both were excoriated by the metropolitan elite and the Left. In 1982 Jeremy Corbyn, then the prospective Labour candidate for Islington North, said of the Falklands campaign: “The whole thing is a Tory plot to keep their money-making friends in business.” He used almost the identical words in 2019 when attacking the Johnson administration’s approach to Brexit.

My father’s book took its title from some verses of GK Chesterton’s which, it seems to me, are as appropriate in 2019 as they were in 1981:

But they that fought for England,
Following a falling star,
Alas, alas for England,
They have their graves afar.

And they that rule in England,
In stately conclave met,
Alas, alas for England
They have no graves as yet.