I was born in 1966. My father was then a youthful minister of the Free Church of Scotland in Lochaber. By the time I began school, he had a new charge in Glasgow.
Partick Highland Free Church — a blue-collar congregation overwhelmingly of Hebrideans. Three of the services he held every week were in Gaelic.
Men came to the midweek prayer meeting murmuring in the accents of Scalpay and Cromore, Ranish and Tolsta. In brief spiritual respite from their day-jobs — be they at the Albion busworks, the Meadowside Granaries, the Clyde Port Authority, untold yards and docks and factories.
Most lived within walking distance of Partick Highland. Entire tenement stairs might as well have been in the Western Isles. From an early age I was aware of a Scotland that made stuff — steel in Motherwell, locomotives at Springburn, linoleum in Kirkcaldy, jam in Carluke and ships on the Clyde.
The Corpach Pulp Mill was at the other end of the village from our first manse. Trees went in at one end; the finest paper was loaded onto trucks and trains from the other. Its rubbery reek was everywhere; vividly, small as I was, I recall, shiploads of still more woodchips sucked ashore into heaps. New housing — the mill employed some 900 people — being flung up everywhere.
Later, I walked home from school within earshot of the ding and clatter of the Upper Clyde Shipyards. Family excursions took us past the Goodyear Tyre works; Clydebank’s Singer sewing-machine plant.
An excursion by train to Edinburgh took you past the cooling-towers of Ravenscraig. Coal-pits with their lofty winding-gear and ski-slopes of slag. Works-whistles howling everywhere, the breadth of that Scotland, come five in the evening. Wiry men tramping home every Thursday evening, wordlessly handing over an unopened pay-packet to the wife.
I was not to know that this was an order — a society — already living on fumes. Much of this labour was nationalised, obsolete, and hopelessly unprofitable. This was a Scotland where coffee was instant, where schools echoed to the thwack of corporal punishment, where it could take you six months to have a telephone line installed or get that new gas cooker.
In 1978, Downing Street ordered two new ministerial Rovers — armour-plated, bulletproof glass, a special radio. On arrival they were quickly found to have thirty-four faults, and were crossly sent back. On their return, James Callaghan opted for an outing.
The Prime Minister was not long clear of Downing Street when, wanting a little fresh air, he pressed the button that was supposed to open his window electronically. The pane promptly fell in on his lap.
Through this unhappy time — her handbag swinging with growing confidence — trotted the Grocer’s Daughter. By the time she was finally wrested from the levers of power, in November 1990, most of what I have described was as Nineveh and Tyre.
Thatcherism was not inevitable. The Callaghan administration, one of the most disciplined and right-wing in our history, almost worked. Then, in less than six months, Thatcher suddenly embodied order — and Callaghan all that was chaos.
She was in some respects very lucky, and at not a few critical moments. Had Heath not from her 1975 triumph embarked upon his famous sulk, she would have had little choice but to appoint him to Cabinet and at her abiding peril. Callaghan chose complacently, late in 1978, not to call a general election. Labour, once he had abandoned the bridge, split; then made itself unelectable. If six more Exocet missile-fuses had not malfunctioned, Thatcher could have lost the Falklands — and her job.
But time and again, too, thanks to the ineptitude of her opponents, great swathes of political space opened up for her. In the South Atlantic, General Galtieri proved a sozzled fool. In the 1984-85 miners’ strike — launched without a national ballot and at the start of an unusually warm spring — such were Arthur Scargill’s misjudgements that some wondered, aloud, if he were actually in the pay of the secret state.
Even in Scotland, as Sir Malcolm Rifkind mused in 2009, she clearly “was the most disliked Prime Minister that the Scots were burdened with in the twentieth century but, paradoxically, also the most admired. Many loathed her in her tenure of power and her name has been used since to terrify the gullible in a manner that used to be reserved for witches and warlocks…”
As recently as May 2009, when the frail old lady — by then, nearly two decades out of power — made her last visit to Scotland, Margaret Curran — a strident Labour MSP — all but spat. “Margaret Thatcher should apologise to Glasgow for her policies that wreaked havoc on our city. The constituency I represent is still trying to recover from the destruction that ensued from her plans and political approach.”
Such is the mythology that Thatcher is even accused of things she never actually did. It was Labour MPs, with their wrecking amendments, who sank Callaghan’s final scheme for Scottish devolution in 1979. She was neither a racist nor a champion of apartheid: from 1984, she lobbied ferociously for the release of Nelson Mandela, and on his release was among the first he sought out to thank. You still see Scottish journalists braying about how she closed the Ravenscraig steelworks. In fact they perished only in 1992, well after she had left office.
It was not so much Mrs Thatcher’s policy as her style that grated so badly this side of the Tweed. “She was a woman; she was an English woman; she was a bossy English woman,” gurgled Rifkind. “Each was a quality many found objectionable. Combined with the cut-glass voice and an apparently patronising manner, they were lethal.”
Nor was she quite the Angel of Death for Scottish Conservative fortunes many portray. In the 1979 general election, they bounced back from a dented 1974 showing, seizing six seats — all from the flailing Nationalists — and a third of the vote. Weeks later, at our first direct European Parliament election, the Scottish Tories actually won a plurality of the vote and five of the eight seats.
If you look at the broader metric, the Scottish Conservative performance after her retirement – in April 1992 — was remarkably similar to their last outing before her leadership. 24.7 per cent of the poll and sixteen seats out of seventy-one in October 1974; eleven seats out of seventy-two in 1992, with 25.6 per cent of the vote.
Several of the 1974 survivors had only won by a sneeze. “Good morning,” Nicolas Fairbairn, fighting to retain Kinross and West Perthshire, leered at one Pitlochry matron. “I hear you’re voting for those f***ing nationalists.”
As he recalled laconically, years later, “My majority, excluding her, was 53.”
Scots did not reject the Tories from 1979 to 1987 because they found Mrs Thatcher signally repellent. They voted for the same reason that swathes of England and most of Wales never voted Tory — because the working-class electorate greatly outnumbered the middle classes and the central battleground in our politics has long been between prosperous, leafy south-east England and everywhere else.
This was dramatically attested at the high tide of Thatcherism, in the 1983 election: Greater London apart, not one Labour MP was returned south of a line between the Severn and the Wash.
It is also too easy to wring a handkerchief over past Scottish Tory fortunes — such as in 1955, when they won a majority of Scottish seats and, with 50.7 per cent of the poll, an absolute majority of the vote, the only party to notch up that post-war feat till the SNP landslide of 2015.
But they then faced very little competition. As late as 1979, the Liberals contested only forty-four Scottish seats; in 1966, the Scottish National Party stood in just twenty-three.
More: the historic, habitual Scottish Tory vote was actually born of the Liberal Unionist secession (over the issue of Home Rule for Ireland) in 1886. Until 1966 they fought most seats as the Scottish Unionists — to great success, but with more than a whiff of Orange. In 1959, Catherine Morton — sister of a celebrated Rangers player — fought Coatbridge and Airdrie for the Unionists, against a new Labour candidate.
Scots can readily guess which town voted for what: James Dempsey retained the seat — but only just; his majority was 794. As late as 1972, two men pursuing the Tory nomination for Berwick and East Lothian had a diverting experience: Malcolm Rifkind’s Jewish heritage troubled no one, but Michael Ancram’s Catholicism was nervously probed. Even a decade later, some whispered that the Tories would have hung on in the Glasgow Hillhead by-election — and kept Roy Jenkins out — had they not fielded a Catholic candidate in their very last Glasgow redoubt.
A 1965 name-change, to the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party, certainly reflected growing unease about electoral decline — but also anxiety to shake off the Lambeg drums.
Margaret Thatcher was in some respects a strange woman. Certainly, by the end of 1979, her personal style had begun to grate on Scots. (By contrast, her first outing over the border, as the new Leader of the Opposition, drew fat crowds, people desperate to touch her, and warm cries of “Maggie, Maggie…” At one Edinburgh event, three women had fainted.)
There were four issues. First, she had skilfully extracted herself from her party’s official commitment to devolution, without ever coming out in direct opposition to it. Indeed, in the referendum for a Scottish Assembly in 1979, she never plumped herself on one side or the other.
Callaghan’s first, 1977 bid for a devolution bill was sunk in a crucial guillotine-vote by the Liberals; his second, the Scotland Act, was scotched by Labour rebels. One, indeed, was the Scottish MP for Islington South and Finsbury, George Cunningham, who forced not only that referendum but a stipulation that 40 per cent of the entire Scots electorate must vote for it.
Spoiler-alert: they didn’t, and in fact devolution simply fell out of the political conversation after 1979, not least because its most fanatical devotees were about fifty people in Edinburgh. Unexpectedly, though not in the least to blame, the SNP took the political hit. Nine of their eleven MPs lost their seats in 1979; they did even worse in 1983 — losing fifty-four deposits — and never threatened her Government again.
She is still blamed for doing Scotland over in abiding folk-memory. But what she has never lived down was the recession that had swept in by 1980 and which, within astonishing speed and largely in her first term, saw the collapse of much Scottish heavy industry.
The Corpach pulp mill was just one casualty. The Invergordon aluminium smelter was another. British Leyland’s truck-plant at Bathgate, Singer in Clydebank, shipyards in Aberdeen, Dundee, Leith and Govan.
Monsanto in Ayrshire, Pye TMC at Livingston, Massey Ferguson at Kilmarnock, VF Corporation at Greenock … Untold people lost their jobs — 61,000 manufacturing posts in 1980 alone. The Sixties baby-boom added a cruel twist: by 1983, a third of males under twenty-five and half their female peers were without work.
Near Falkirk, the Carron Iron Works had been in business since 1759. Its pillar-boxes still stand all over the British Isles. Its pots were shipped across the Empire; it had cast the cannon for Trafalgar. But, in August 1982, Carron folded forever.
Entire communities were devastated. Suicide, family breakdown and drug-addiction soared
Scottish manufacturing had been declining under Labour. They had even closed some coalmines. The pound — now, with North Sea oil in full flow, effectively a petrocurrency — was too high. Even so, a central Thatcher tenet was no help for lame ducks. The early Eighties in Scotland were, accordingly, brutal; there was a second recessionary kick from 1986, when the oil price crashed, and by then there had been all the drama of the miners’ strike.
Entire communities were devastated. Suicide, family breakdown and drug-addiction soared. In some parts of the land we are now in the fourth generation of unemployment: the blighted estates of despair and decay, Fraser Nelson, in 2008, dubbed “Third Scotland.” That it all largely would have happened anyway, even under a second Callaghan government, was no comfort.
Of course there was another story to be told. Thousands and thousands of new jobs materialised in electronics, in connection with North Sea oil, in the service-economy and so on. Scots everywhere seized the chance to buy their own council-house, on generous terms. Aspirational families warmed to such imaginative school measures as the Parents’ Charter and the Assisted Places Scheme. Many in the Highlands recall the Eighties, Corpach and Invergordon notwithstanding, as a golden age. A fleet of gleaming new Caledonian MacBrayne ferries; stately new bridges spanning straits and firths; even — albeit briefly — 90 per cent home improvement grants.
Still, a fifth of our industrial base was gone, with unemployment doubling. The oddest thing was that there was no immediate political consequence. Not one riot. The Nationalists, now faction-ridden, remained irrelevant. At the 1983 election, the Tories emerged with the same net number of Scottish seats as at the start of the campaign — twenty-one — and 31 per cent of the vote. Henry Drucker, an Edinburgh academic, groused of the “dog that did not bark”. Ironically, the era is best remembered in a lugubrious 1987 hit by The Proclaimers — with its own litany of saints.
Bathgate no more
Linwood no more
Methil no more
Lochaber no more…
But the Scottish Tories could not indefinitely hover over the electoral abyss. Fatefully, they had never really embedded themselves in local government. Candidates had generally stood under such vague labels as Independent, Ratepayers or Progressive. An ageing party, increasingly short of activists and that, by the mid Eighties, had become repugnant to the young.
Some assert it was the miners’ strike that was the sucker-punch. But few of us knew any miners — by 1984, there were only some 15,000 in Scotland; the last deep pit would close in 2002. And picket-line thuggery had disgusted many. It was really a succession of Scottish Office blunders in the winter of 1985-86 that proved the tipping-point, riling many Scots to anger and to the widespread tactical voting of the 1987 election — almost playful, at least for the bourgeoisie confident that Thatcher was going to win it anyway. How we sneered, even as we ordered shares in British Telecom.
It was on an Edinburgh afternoon, amidst that campaign, I had my only glimpse of this Prime Minister. I was part of a tiny student demo in a Young Scottish Nationalist t-shirt, hollering the inevitable “Maggie, Maggie, Maggie — out, out, out.” Mrs Thatcher alighted from her car, a vision in blue. She paused to beam at small boys from a private school fluttering their Union Jacks by the steps of Bute House — the official residence, then, of the Secretary of State for Scotland — and scampered inside as the flashbulbs popped.
She exuded energy; a sort of gutsy cheerfulness. I was struck by her walk. A little stooped, almost a scurry; short steps, like a corncrake.
Mrs Thatcher is a paradox because she spent her youth plotting to get the blazes out of Grantham — as far away as possible from the corner-shop, the bacon-slicer, the outdoor privy and Sunday chapel — and, by forty-nine, had wholly reinvented herself as a coiffed, plummy-voiced gin-and-Jag matron.
Then, in command of her party, it became expedient to big up her proletarian East Midlands past, even as she had the humility to gather in experts for advice on her image and the wisdom to take it.
Save for church, Mrs Thatcher abandoned the eccentric hats. Soon foreswore fussy florals and dowdy tweeds. She found a look that suited her — tailored suits or dresses of understated elegance, often softened with a pussy-bow blouse. One point was non-negotiable — she refused to discard the double-rope of pearls Denis had presented her on the birth of their twins.
She darkened her hair somewhat and, by 1983, had fixed a distinctive gap in her teeth. Thatcher also worked very hard on that shrill, thin and over-elocuted voice. She met Sir Laurence Olivier for tips. Spent hours and hours in humming-sessions to deepen her tone.
Though a formidable performer — seldom, from 1979, bested in the Commons and never in the sort of long-form television interview politicians seem loath to risk today — she cleverly exploited unusual media. She went on children’s programmes. She liked Radio 2’s Jimmy Young Show, for its vast audience and the less than forensic questioning. Eyebrows were raised when she gave a long interview to Woman’s Own and, indeed, put herself in their hands for a makeover — but, half a century ago, it was an intelligent magazine, with nearly a million readers.
She was, even in her sixties, a strikingly attractive woman. Jocks and Geordies in the Falklands pinned up pictures of her in their tents. The roguish Alan Clark longed for a “massive snog.” Even her opponents were not immune, Dr David Owen once sighing to Brian Walden, “The whiff of that perfume, the sweet smell of whisky. By God, Brian, she’s appealing beyond belief …”
In truth, she was sly, canny, adaptable, tough as teak
Thatcher always seemed to be the best-briefed person in the room. She knew the doings of all Government departments better than most of their ministers. She liked to posture as an ideologue; a woman of conviction. When a Soviet journalist in 1976 slammed her as the “Iron Lady,” she exulted in it. In truth, she was sly, canny, adaptable, tough as teak — until 1987, the brilliant and consummate politician.
Nothing threw her. Once someone had the effrontery to ask where she bought her underwear. The Prime Minister stared. “At Marks and Spencer, of course. Doesn’t everyone?” She loved whisky, cooking, was an adept seamstress and enjoyed dusting. Every day, throughout her premiership and when they were home, whatever the wider crisis, she made Denis breakfast.
But people noticed how untactile she was, even with her own children. That the cocky, grasping Mark seemed to be favoured over his unassuming sister. How little the Prime Minister ever spoke of her mother. Thatcher also seemed unable to project empathy. There was always that priggish, bookish, argumentative sense of The Most Unpopular Girl in the Lower Fifth.
Mrs Thatcher liked tall, trim, handsome men, especially in uniform. She was relaxed around gay ones, especially when they adored her. She really disliked vague, blobby men, like Heath or Howe. Never a countrywoman: Balmoral was to be endured. She loathed coal, trains, and — oddly, for an alderman’s daughter — local government. And therein, hatched in Scotland, lay the seeds of her downfall.
Her first Shadow Secretary of State for Scotland had been Alick Buchanan-Smith. A convinced devolutionist, he resigned on principle in 1977 when she ordered a change of direction. Then she picked Glasgow Cathcart MP Teddy Taylor, a genial terrier of a man. He had one job, she intoned: to destroy the Nationalists.
The Shadow Secretary of State for Scotland could do that, he agreed, but at great risk to his own seat. Where, indeed, the SNP vote collapsed in 1979 and Labour tipped him out. Taylor was back in Parliament within the year, but never rewarded with a ministry — too busy banging on about Europe; yip-yap-yipping for the return of hanging, as Stephen Daisley has joked, as if he had shares in rope.
It was George Younger then, MP for Ayr, who in May 1979 accepted the Great Seal of Scotland. A scion of the Scottish beerage: patrician, and avuncular, with an unfortunate combover. He was no Thatcherite — indeed, his schtick was to make out that, but for him, Scotland would have been effortlessly handbagged. And he lacked a vital political ability: to see round corners.
In a few scant months from late in 1985, Younger trod on one banana-skin after another. There was an unexpectedly severe revaluation of domestic rates. The steel-rolling mill at Gartcosh came under serious threat, and buckled. Scots were alarmed by the sale of the freestanding Scottish Trustee Savings Bank, and furious to learn that cold-weather payouts to pensioners only kicked in at chillier temperatures than in England.
As the Scottish Tories tumbled in the polls, Younger and his acolytes fumbled for some way out of the local-government finance mire and, unfortunately, what they came up with was a flat charge — the levy set by each local council — on every adult. They called it the “community charge.” Everyone else called it the Poll Tax. And the Prime Minister soon dreamed of unrolling it across the United Kingdom.
“While I can just about understand why, in extremis, Mrs Thatcher opted for its introduction in Scotland given the prevailing circumstances,” Brian Wilson has mused, “I have always marvelled at its subsequent extension to the rest of the UK as an act of complete political lunacy.”
Scottish Conservative fortunes had actually picked up by the 1987 election, having languished in the mid-teens in some polls. But, even with 28.4 per cent of the vote, they suddenly crashed through the PR floor, losing eleven of their seats and several of their ministers.
The Nationalists regained three turnipy shires — but lost the two seats they had held since 1979. Younger — now Defence Secretary — came within 200 votes of losing Ayr. Nor were all the shocked survivors employable.
And still Thatcher stormed on with the community charge. “That was the one mistake Margaret made,” Michael Dobbs has reflected.
“She forgot that it was a tax. She was a tax cutter, and she introduced a new tax. People just couldn’t understand that…” Worse, many of them were what the Prime Minister always called “my people.” Pillars of the community. Newsagents, police constables, ward-sisters, clergymen. All the wives in single-income households, every student, people with learning-difficulties born to parents fiercely opposed to abortion — all now to be clobbered with the Poll Tax.
Had she stood down on the tenth anniversary of her 1979 triumph … Mrs Thatcher would have gone out in a blaze of glory
Something changed in Thatcher around this time — not least her wardrobe. Fewer pussybow-blouses; more angular, more shoulder-pads, more Aquascutum. She had become an exhausting person to work with. Increasingly inflexible; disinclined to listen. One tirade days before the 1987 election — over a couple of scary polls — had shaken the room. “That,” murmured Viscount Whitelaw to Dobbs, as all dispersed, “is a woman who will never fight another election campaign.”
Had she stood down on the tenth anniversary of her 1979 triumph — as Denis implored her to do — Mrs Thatcher would have gone out in a blaze of glory. Everything then rapidly turned sour. Inflation and interest rates rose, as the boom fizzled out in that hot 1989 summer. For the first time, on her watch, the Tories lost a national election — for the European Parliament. There was a botched reshuffle, the faithful Geoffrey Howe being humiliatingly demoted. Then she parted disastrously with Nigel Lawson.
Still, Gloriana Imperatrix had no idea how vulnerable she now was. Very few of her true believers even sat in the Cabinet. Most were tired of her. Important colleagues now fretted about her hardening attitude to the European Union: after serious Poll Tax riots in London — the footage was almost medieval — many Tory MPs now feared for their seats.
On the 1989 night she saw off Sir Anthony Meyer’s timid “stalking-donkey” bid for the leadership, Thatcher preened outside No. 10 in a vast fur-collared coat that could have adorned a Tsarina. At the Lord Mayor’s Monday banquet in the Guildhall, the day before Howe’s devastating resignation speech in November 1990, she turned up “like Queen Elizabeth I at Tilbury,” John Campbell records, “in a black velvet gown with a high collar, cloak and pearls. Never in all her years of power dressing had she worn anything so ostentatiously regal: at the very moment when she needed to show some humility her dress positively screamed hubris.”
With deadly understatement, Howe savaged her. By Thursday, Michael Heseltine had announced his leadership bid. George Younger, now the distracted Chairman of the Royal Bank of Scotland, nominally managed Thatcher’s campaign. It effectively fell to her appalling Parliamentary Private Secretary, Peter Morrison, a boozy and complacent pederast.
By month’s end, Thatcher was gone.
Jarring memories abide. Baying picket-lines, shuttered plants and factories. Acres of wasteland; cooling-towers blown up. Miners’ pale wives collecting scant provision at some ad hoc foodbank. Yuppies dancing a conga; the night members of the Federation of Conservative Students trashed some venue, discharging fire-extinguishers and pouring champagne by the bottle down toilets.
Margaret Thatcher, the late Peregrine Worsthorne once observed, had set out to remake the land in the image of her father — and, instead, reinvented it in the image of her son.
She had many more years still to live. Widowed in 2003; latterly a lost, vacant figure. She listened to Songs of Praise; looked through pictures of cats.
Charles Powell, most loyal of her lieutenants, looked back on Mrs Thatcher’s political demise nearly thirty years later. “I don’t think she ever really had a happy day in her life from the moment she had to leave Number Ten.”
