Events, Dear Boy, Events by Ruth Winstone

Author:Ruth Winstone
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile Books
Published: 2012-03-17T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

1982–1990

Civil War

As Giles Radice observed, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan had started the 1980s badly. The decade ended with the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. On a visit to Abu Dhabi as Defence Minister in August 1990, Alan Clark wrote: ‘If the ruling families [of the Gulf] start to pack up and emigrate to their lodges at Newmarket or Longchamps … we’ve had it.’ The long-term effects of these wars on foreign and defence policy were considerable, but after the Falklands War of 1982, the politics of the decade were generally inward-looking.

Margaret Thatcher led the Conservatives to a second electoral victory in 1983 and a third in 1987. During the same period the Liberal and Labour Parties were undergoing substantial – and historic – change. Paddy Ashdown became Leader of the newly formed Social and Liberal Democrats in July 1988, shortly after, in Ashdown’s words, it had sunk ‘disastrously in the polls and became the subject of ridicule.’ The new party was a marriage between the Social Democratic Party (SDP), and the remains of the Liberal Party. David Owen of the SDP, who took over from Roy Jenkins (leader 1982–3), would not accept the new party and together with a few Liberals refused to join. The bad feeling led Paddy Ashdown to wonder in his diaries if the great Liberal Party that began with Gladstone would end with Ashdown.

Neil Kinnock won the Labour Party leadership in October 1983 and set in train a process of much-contested modernisation which would be completed by a future leader, not yet elected to Parliament.

Two major domestic conflicts, also with long-term ramifications, broke out in 1984 and 1985: the first being the Conservative government versus the NUM; the second, News International against the print unions. The News of the World columnist and ex-politician Woodrow Wyatt, who as a Labour MP had served in Attlee’s government, became self-appointed confidante to Margaret Thatcher and the Murdochs (not to mention the Queen Mother), and fortunately confided all to his diaries.

‘In danger of becoming a devotee,’ Michael Spicer was the Prime Minister’s parliamentary aide between the Falklands victory and the General Election of ’83; Edwina Currie, outspoken as a Conservative MP and perceptive as a diarist, considered her chances of becoming party leader; and Gyles Brandreth, poised to become a Conservative candidate in 1990, notes that Margaret Thatcher ‘has eaten every single one’ of the Cabinet of 1979.

Saturday, 25 September 1982

Compared to last year, when the Left was riding high with successes everywhere, this year the Left is very much tail-between-legs. We did unleash a violent backlash from the Right supported by the media and the general secretaries, and although the Party is pretty solid on policy it doesn’t want divisions, so we are caught by the constraint of unity – whereas they, being on the warpath, are not, and are demanding the expulsion of the Left. It’s very unpleasant but I shall just let it ride over me; at this stage we have to accept that the Right have won and there isn’t much we can do about it.

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