Andy Beckett offered us illuminating social history in his previous books When the Lights Went Out and Pinochet in Picadilly. Promised You a Miracle looks at Thatcherism as it rolls up its sleeves.
Early on, he dispatches the British motor industry, and the British Leyland company which in 1979 experienced a total of 234 strikes or shorter stoppages, and in the first half of 1980, 126 strikes. 1,299,300 people were officially jobless in the UK when Margaret Thatcher took office as Prime Minister in 1979. By the end of 1980, the official jobless total was 2,244,000, an increase of almost a million during the first eighteen months of Thatcher’s reign. By 1982, over three million were unemployed with no notable reversal in the numbers seen again until 1987.
The Iron Lady opportunistically used the Falklands/Malvinas War which to show her mettle and galvanize a sizable slice of British opinion on her side. Indeed she received praise for her stand against the Argentinians from many quarters (though famously not from Charles Haughey.) ‘The superb demonstration of British guts and British efficiency’ cooed Richard Nixon in a telegram to Thatcher at the time of the conflict.
Beckett also recalls the ins and outs of the Cold War and the end of detente. In 1983, US President Ronald Reagan famously told the American National Association of Evangelicals that the Soviet Union was `the focus of evil in the modern world.’
The David Puttnam-directed film, Chariots of Fire numbered among its financiers one Dodi Fayed, yet it almost failed to get a cinema release. It finally opened inauspiciously on Easter Monday 1982 at London's Odeon Haymarket, a 600-seater which was only two-thirds full for the screening.
But the Fire took, as it were, and the Chariot ran - at the height of the film's box-office success three-and-a-half-million had seen it in the UK . Subsequently it began to be screened at Conservative Party fund-raisers. It won Best Picture, Best Screenplay, Best Original Score and Best Costume Design at the 1982 Oscars. And the reason for its success? The film critic Alexander Walker tried to answer this in the (London) Evening Standard: “It puts you in direct touch with sentiments so long unexpressed... love of country, fear of God... modesty in victory.” (Don't know if anyone would write that class of thing nowadays in the UK.)
The Vangelis-composed theme single to the film went to number 12 in the UK chart, and to number one in the USA. Ronald Reagan liked the movie (doh.) Its director David Puttnam recalls the popularity of the Vangelis theme, since used vapidly as TV filler music surely a million times in the past 34 years. “I remembered going shopping on The King’s Road (in Chelsea) and after I’d walked in and out of about five shops, including the butchers, and it was playing in every single shop, I started laughing.“
Beckett’s title is the name of a popular chart hit from the time, released by the Jim Kerr-fronted band Simple Minds. Usefully, when the author comes to look at the British music scene in the early 1980s and the rise of the New Romantics, he looks for the paradigm, the parable. Thus his account of how the post-punk Sheffield band Vice Versa became the opportunistic ABC - thus reinventing themselves in a bid for that hitherto unfashionable thing called stardom - proves instructive.
In the acknowledgments, the author credits journalist and commentator Paul Morley, ABC singer Martin Fry, Ken Livingstone, Jeremy Isaacs and Phil Redmond “for telling me things that weren’t in the books “ (by which he means the historical sources, which of necessity he has also drawn on.)
Beckett has a natural feel for the period – he was 11 in 1981 – and his 390-page work goes some way to enlighten us as to how Britain got to where it is today, with Brexit and various other national dilemmas on its agenda.
Paddy Kehoe
