The music itself was to prove yet another example of the English genius for restitching foreign fashions. In front of a solitary disc jockey mixing melodies and beats, dancers swayed and writhed as if before a priest preparing a sacrifice. Indeed, it seems more than coincidental that this movement ripened in tandem with a religious revival, one as striking as it was ephemeral. The Pentecostal movement, largely Afro-Caribbean in origin, had spread to the white suburbs and even into the city. There it became ‘charismatic’. As if its meaning had not already changed enough, ‘house party’ could now refer to a weekend away on an evangelical retreat. There was a surge of new religious movements or cults, with Mormons, ‘Moonies’ and Hare Krishna devotees increasingly in evidence. The first tales of alien abduction began to be heard and garish rumours of satanic sexual abuse slid into the tabloid press. Happily, they proved insubstantial, but they too were a sign that the so-called age of consumption was avid for the wondrous, the bizarre and the unearthly.
In the spring of 1984, news came that Ethiopia had fallen victim to a famine. Even to a nation jaded by pictures of Belfast bombings, the images of suffering had the power to move and appal. One man was convinced that something could be done, and by musicians. Bob Geldof, lead singer of the Boomtown Rats, possessed an almost boundless force of will. In November 1984, he and Midge Ure of Ultravox composed ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ for famine relief, and it soon sold over 3 million records. But Geldof had only begun his mission. He appeared on television, tired, tousled and plainly impatient, addressing the camera with jabbing finger. ‘If you’ve given your money already, go to your neighbour and bang on their door and tell them to send some too.’ In 1985, he employed his formidable skills as missionary and arm-twister to cajole the great and good of the musical world to play at a concert, for free. It was to be called ‘Live Aid’. Although George Harrison had established a precedent in a concert for Bangladesh in 1972, nothing on this scale had been attempted. More remarkable yet, it was all arranged within a month. Over a fifth of the world’s population watched the concert and it generated many millions; as with many such feats, the purity of the original vision occluded many troublesome questions about its effects. The important thing, as Geldof proclaimed, was that something be done. The idea is with us stilclass="underline" good intentions are sacred in themselves. It was not quite a Thatcherite position, but it suited the climate well and set a precedent. The role of the musician was no longer to furnish entertainment; he or she was now moral instructor and spiritual guide.
Another conception of the artist as deserving beneficiary rather than paid jongleur was seen in the artistic community’s response to Thatcher and Thatcherism. Indeed, the reaction of many artists seemed not so much emotional or intellectual as olfactory; she stank in their nostrils till they quivered. Jonathan Miller spoke of her ‘suburban gentility … her saccharine patriotism.’ How could such a one understand the aspirations and yearnings of the true artist? The hatred had at least as much to do with her policies as with her personality. Although her government spent more on the arts than its predecessor, it spent less as a percentage of GDP, which could not help but impinge upon an innately delicate realm. Particularly for those in the performing arts, labour-intensive and largely unprofitable as they must be, the smallest dip in subsidy could result in ruin; this was seen in the collapse of the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company in 1982. The answer, Thatcher reasoned, was to bring in the businessmen, which only exacerbated matters for the intelligentsia: was the holy of holies to ring with the vulgar cries of the costermonger? Moreover, the theatre particularly had a proud tradition of leftist sympathies; the values of drama and Thatcherism were thus felt to be irreconcilable.
54
Was she always right?
In some quarters of the artistic establishment, Thatcher was openly declared a fascist. Her politics were understood as ‘an authoritarian dogma … bright with pastels’. In Greek, Steven Berkoff’s reimagining of Oedipus Tyrannus, the Jocasta character refers to Thatcher as ‘dear old Maggot’, mentioning that her portrait is on the wall beside one of Hitler. A production of Richard III was criticized for failing to make a comparison between the hunchbacked tyrant and the current prime minister. An increasingly politicized Harold Pinter seemed to take it for granted that Thatcher represented a new and sinister mutation of the fascist plague. In popular culture, the notion was still more prevalent. A video for the pop group the Communards depicted Britain as a totalitarian state, with grey overcoats and menacing guards in evidence. And Spitting Image regularly portrayed Thatcher in the attire of a military leader who had attained power by dubious means. It may be that the word ‘fascist’ had lost some of its power as the generations rolled. When Enoch Powell was heckled with cries of ‘fascist’ and ‘Nazi’, he remarked, ‘Before many of those accusing me of fascism and Nazism were born, I was fighting both fascism and Nazism.’
Thatcher herself was certainly authoritarian in temperament and often in address. She was deeply unpopular even among many who voted for her. She was unapologetic in her belief that the police were the guardians of law and order and should be respected as such. That she presided over more than her due share of battles between policemen and dissidents cannot be denied. In education, she imposed a national curriculum on unwilling teachers, though her influence in that sphere was far less pervasive than was generally believed. During the Falklands War, her willingness to accept help from the Chilean dictator Pinochet stained her in the eyes of many. And it may be that her very poise counted against her: she was always right.
But her regime was as liberal as any before or since; she was a lifelong foe of tyranny; she placed herself in the firing line whenever one existed; she was democratically elected three times; and she gave succour to the impulse for freedom whenever she thought it had a chance of life. The charge that she was a ‘Little Englander’ was harder to refute, though in truth she was more of a ‘Big Englander’; she did not understand the aspirations of Wales or Scotland, and tended to construe Great Britain as no more than a greater England.
But whether a ‘little’ or ‘big’ Englander, Thatcher was hard to perceive as a European. This was not through want of effort on her part. She had been an enthusiastic supporter of the Common Market and a leading participant in the negotiations that led to the Single European Act. It may be that landslide of 1987 had lent Thatcher a new sense of confidence that rendered impregnable her notion of Britain leading Europe by its example of capitalist revolution. It was her misfortune to have as antagonist a man whose understanding of the European Community, and Britain’s role in it, was quite different.
Jacques Delors had been appointed president of the Commission in part owing to Thatcher’s good offices. In her eyes, he was vastly preferable to the alternative candidate, a socialist; Delors respected Thatcher as a ‘rich and complex character’, who had done much to accelerate the progress of the Single Market. In the aftermath of the Single European Act of 1985, a largely British achievement, they had worked well together; yet few political honeymoons have proved quite so tempestuous or indeed ephemeral. Delors, like de Gaulle before him, found it hard to distinguish between the interests of France and those of the European Community. Moreover, the brash new anglophone world forged by Reagan and Thatcher was little to his taste. And for all his energy and apparent modernity, Delors seemed the denizen of an older world, one in which France ruled the conference table just as Britain ruled the waves. On one occasion, when asked why he refused to speak in English, Delors retorted: ‘Parce que le Français c’est la langue de la diplomatie … ’ (Because French is the language of diplomacy). And in a growling undertone, he added: ‘et de la civilization!’ (and of civilization).