The Iron Lady

style trade unionism, defending jobs – and in the printers’ case grotesque overmanning and the systematic blackmail of a peculiarly vulnerable industry – and management’s right to manage. As in the coalfields, angry pickets tried to prevent Murdoch’s new workforce getting to work, turning the streets around ‘Fortress Wapping’ into a nightly battleground. The Government was fully entitled to treat it as a law-and-order issue which had to be won; but at the same time it was an intensely political confrontation and another vital test of Thatcherism on the ground. According to Andrew Neil – editor of the Sunday Times from 1983 to 1994 – Murdoch obtained Mrs Thatcher’s personal assurance before the dispute began that ‘enough police would be available to allow us to go about our lawful business. She assured him that there would be… and she kept her word.’⁴⁴ As with the NUM, she wanted victory, not compromise.

The curiosity of Mrs Thatcher’s gushing support for Murdoch is how she squared it with her dislike of pornography. Had she ever turned the pages of the Sun, she would have been appalled; but Ingham’s daily digest spared her this embarrassment. Of course she knew about the topless Page Three girls; but she frankly closed her eyes to the rest of the paper’s daily diet of sleazy sex in exchange for its robust support, rationalising it as the price of freedom.

In 1990 she once again showed Murdoch outrageous favouritism by allowing him to hijack satellite television in its infancy by buying out the competition, without reference to the Monopolies Commission. Her anxiety to keep Murdoch’s newspapers on side, and her willingness to bend the regulations to buy their continuing support, was the grubbiest face of Thatcherism. Murdoch enjoyed a special place in the Prime Minister’s circle of the elect – not a courtier but a powerful independent ally and family friend, rather like Ronald Reagan – who had direct access to her whenever he sought it. He was the only newspaper proprietor invited to the Downing Street lunch to mark her tenth anniversary in 1989, and was several times invited to spend Christmas with the family at Chequers. Yet she never once mentioned him in her memoirs.

The arts in the market place

Mrs Thatcher had an educated person’s proper respect for the arts, but she had little feel for them. Like Christianity, the great books, paintings and music of the past provided a cultural heritage to be praised and raided for validation of the present. From her diligent childhood she retained a superficial familiarity with the major English classics; she could still quote from memory large chunks of poetry she had learned at school; and having both played the piano as a girl and sung in the Oxford Bach Choir at university she had a better than average knowledge of music. Within the fairly narrow limits of what she liked, she was by no means a philistine. As Prime Minister she occasionally went to the opera. She collected porcelain and (with advice from experts) Chinese scrolls. And if she did not have much time or taste for reading fiction – beyond the occasional Freddie Forsyth or John le Carre thriller, or Solzhenitsyn read as homework on the Soviet Union – she did read an astonishing amount of serious non-fiction (philosophy, theology, science and history) not directly related to the business of government.

Yet her taste in the arts was characteristically simple and relentlessly functional. She had no patience with complexity or ambiguity, no time for imagination. She thought art should be beautiful, positive and improving, not disturbing or subversive. She liked books which told her things she needed to know. She had a retentive memory and liked to be able to quote things that she had read long ago. But she could not talk about the arts. The paintings she really liked were the portraits of national heroes – Nelson,Wellington, Churchill – and great British scientists – Newton, Faraday – with which she filled the walls of Number Ten; and she always took visitors on a tour of the pictures, pointing the political moral of each one. Her idea of art was essentially didactic.

What she disapproved of was the view of the arts as yet another nationalised industry, a playground of spoiled children – gifted maybe, but self-indulgent – who expected to be supported by the taxpayer for the gratification of an elite who should be made to pay for their own pleasures. As a result, Government policy towards the arts was a matter of containing public spending, requiring value for the money allocated and demanding that arts organisations should become more self-supporting – in other words, more commercial. Her model for arts patronage was the United States: companies and galleries, she believed, should not look to the state for funding but to private enterprise. In fact, the level of public subsidy – already pretty static since 1973 – was not cut in absolute terms. The Arts Council’s budget actually increased from ?63 million in 1979 – 80 to ?176 million in 1990 – 91, which on paper more than kept ahead of inflation. It did not feel like that on the ground, however, where costs rose faster than general inflation and most institutions felt their income constantly reduced. No doubt this made arts organisations leaner, more efficient and more anxious to get ‘bums on seats’. But the need to attract sponsorship also dictated that artistic criteria were increasingly subordinated to commercial considerations, resulting in big, safe exhibitions, middle-brow plays with small casts and bankable TV stars, and frequent revivals of the most popular stalwarts of the operatic repertoire.

Towards the end of the decade, however, Mrs Thatcher did start to think that the country should do something memorable to mark the millennium. ‘We are really going to be rather lucky if we live to that day’, she told an audience of magazine editors in July 1988. ‘We must celebrate it with something special’.

I am very well aware that if we are going to do something great… it will take about ten years to do it, but… I think we should not only build something special or do something special – we should be able to do something which affects every town, city and every village.

‘I think’, she concluded, ‘that come the 1990s we will have to set up a group to really take this in hand’.⁴⁵ Whatever project was ultimately chosen she clearly expected the decision to be hers. We can be sure she would have commissioned something more enduring than New Labour’s vapid dome.

19 Irish Dimension

The IRA: a real enemy

MRS Thatcher faced one real enemy within: Irish republican terrorism. When she came into office in 1979 the ‘troubles’ in Northern Ireland were already ten years old. Ever since Harold Wilson had sent in the army – originally to protect the Catholic minority from the Protestant backlash against their demand for civil rights – Britain had been caught up in a bloody security operation in Northern Ireland, attempting to keep peace between the communities while increasingly targeted as an occupying force by the Provisional IRA. Since then successive Secretaries of State had striven to devise new initiatives to resolve the conflict, while the ‘provos’ kept up a vicious guerrilla campaign against military and Unionist targets alike. From a peak in 1971–3, when 200 British soldiers and around 600 civilians died in three years, the toll had settled down to about a dozen soldiers, a similar number of police and forty or fifty civilians killed each year; but there were also regular bombings and murders on the British mainland, mostly in London, though the worst single incident was the bombing of a pub in Birmingham in 1976 which killed twenty-one people and injured a hundred more.

Over the next decade the terror continued, and several times it touched Mrs Thatcher herself very closely. At the outset of the election campaign which brought her to power, her mentor Airey Neave was blown up in his car in the precincts of the Palace of Westminster, apparently by the INLA, a splinter faction from the IRA. At the very end of her time in office another of her closest confidants, Ian Gow – another staunch Unionist – was murdered at his house in Sussex. Exactly midway between these two horrors the IRA’s most audacious coup, the bombing of the Grand Hotel in Brighton in October 1984, came close to killing the Prime Minister herself and did kill or seriously injure several of her ministerial colleagues or their wives. At a purely human level, Margaret Thatcher