Things Can Only Get Better by John O'Farrell

Author:John O'Farrell [John O’Farrell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Transworld
Published: 2015-06-17T16:00:00+00:00

Three cheers for Alf Dubs

General Election – 11 June 1987

Two things struck me simultaneously on the evening of 26 February 1987. One was that there was no way that Labour was going to win the forthcoming general election, and the other was that Rosie Barnes had remarkably sweaty armpits. As she held her arms aloft to celebrate her victory in the Greenwich by-election she exposed the huge dark circles of sweat that had soaked through her dress as evidence of just how hard she had worked for this victory. She turned this way and that, waving to supporters and clasping her hands together in the air again, just in case there were one or two TV crews or photographers who had not yet recorded that she had forgotten her Sure Extra-dry under-arm spray that morning.

But the dampness of Rosie Barnes’s armpits should never have been exposed to the nation in this way. Greenwich had been a Labour seat for 50 years, and here we were losing it to the SDP only months before a general election. A party that is going to overturn a majority of 100 at a general election does not lose one of its safest seats in the run-up to the campaign. I climbed dejectedly into the bath and lay there listening to the analysis of the result on a Radio 4 by-election special which described the SDP’s victory as ‘spectacular’ and ‘historic’. I could foresee these superlatives being wheeled out again in a few months’ time to describe Margaret Thatcher’s third successive general election victory.

Greenwich is a lovely place when the tide is in. But the tide was most definitely going out. Labour’s victory a few miles upstream in Fulham was a distant memory. In the autumn of 1986 Nigel Lawson had performed a dramatic U-turn and injected £5 billion into the economy, successfully creating a ‘feel-good factor’ in the run-up to the general election. When Wandsworth Council had faced re-election, they had given thousands of households free window boxes that were carefully timed to come into bloom just before election day. On polling day every window sill in my road was a riot of blue and violet flowers (not red, obviously). The government’s dramatic abandonment of monetarism in 1986 put money in people’s pockets and increased spending on schools, hospitals and public services. It was the £5 billion equivalent of free window boxes. Labour’s poll rating gradually slipped back and was now frighteningly low.

The mood among Labour MPs in the House of Commons was one of grim foreboding. As Frank Dobson got his papers together and put them into a box file before leaving for the duration of the campaign, I said to him in my annoying, optimistic way, ‘That’ll be a red box in a month’s time.’ He attempted an upbeat ‘Aye, we’ll show them’ sort of reply, but he did not sound very convinced. The swing that we required to evict Mrs Thatcher was enormous. There was a poster in Alf’s office that the party had produced after the débâcle of 1983 in order to depress ourselves even further.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.