Dan Snow's History Hit - Britain in the 1980s

Episode Date: March 8, 2020

Dominic Sandbrook is one of Britain’s most prolific historians, working his way through a series on Britain since the Second World War. His most recent book examines the pivotal early years of Marga...ret Thatcher’s premiership. In this podcast, Dominic and I discuss the social change of the tumultuous 1980s, a decade of the personal computer, snooker, Spandau Ballet, the Falklands War, and of course, The Iron Lady. For ad free versions of our entire podcast archive and hundreds of hours of history documentaries, interviews and films, including our new in depth documentary about the bombing war featuring James Holland and other historians, please signup to www.HistoryHit.TV Use code 'pod6' at checkout for six weeks free. 

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. Today we are going to be talking about that turbulent decade, the 1980s, again the end of the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher, beloved by some, hated by others. What's the reality? We've got Dominic Sandbrook talking to us, he's one of the most well-known popular historians in the UK, just written a brilliant book called Who Dares Wins, about the first few years of the Thatcher administration. We had a really interesting time because we talked a little bit about the politics, about the history of those years. And then I tried to step back a bit
Starting point is 00:00:28 and ask him whether the things that he talks about, the cultural and political history of those years, is actually what they will be truly remembered for in decades and centuries to come. It was a really fun discussion about the nature of history itself. You will be able to see Dominic Zambrook on our History Channel, historyhit.tv. You'll be able to hear ad-free versions of all these podcasts on
Starting point is 00:00:51 historyhit.tv. You will be able to listen to all the podcasts from 2015 and 2016 exclusively on historyhit.tv. They are not available anywhere else on planet Earth. Head over to historyhit.tv, They are not available anywhere else on planet Earth. Head over to history.tv, use the code POD6, P-O-D-6, and you get six weeks for free to check it out. In the meantime, though, everyone, here is Dominic Sandbrook. Okay, thanks so much for coming on the show. It's a pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Starting point is 00:01:23 I've got a legend in the studio. And I'm here too. I'm going to start with, what's the most important decade to understanding the politics of the now, of all the ones you've studied? It's a very boring answer, and I happen to have a book about it, but it's the true answer.
Starting point is 00:01:40 I think it's probably the 80s. You think so, yeah. It's probably the 80s when, I guess, you and I were both... Very young, very young. I mean, almost nots. You think so, yeah. It's probably the 80s when I guess you and I were both... Very young, very young. I mean, almost not born. Both of us. In your case, maybe.
Starting point is 00:01:49 Yeah, I think it's probably the 80s. The 80s, you know, it's sort of classically Thatcher's decade. A huge shift economically for Britain. But I think it's also... I think the key thing about it is that it was the decade, it's the period in which Britain's sense of itself changed from the sort of, Britain rediscovered a kind of populist patriotism. And, I mean, this is a drum that's been beaten
Starting point is 00:02:26 a lot in the last two or three years but obviously an identity that was not European I think it rediscovered that in the 80s and coming so soon after having joined the European community in 1973
Starting point is 00:02:41 I think that was a big moment I think Britain also rediscovered a kind of... If I say self-confidence, that makes it sound like I'm meaning that's a good thing, and I don't mean it in that way, but it did rediscover a kind of self-confidence and a belief that Britain was special and different and that Britain was dynamic and all these kinds of things.
Starting point is 00:03:02 And it sort of rebounded from imperial decline. Yes. So in the 70s, it was all sort of rebounded from imperial decline. Yes. So in the 70s, it was all sort of, oh, woe is us. You know, the classic kind of James Callaghan, who was prime minister at the end of the 70s, who says, you know, when I'm shaving, I look in the mirror and I say to myself, if I was a younger man, I'd emigrate. To have your prime minister voicing those kind of sentiments is sub-ideal, I think,
Starting point is 00:03:27 for any country. But nobody would have said that at the end of the 80s. I think even if people hated Thatcher and all she stood for and what she'd done to Britain, Britain was still a more dynamic, forward-thinking country. And I think once that happened, then Britain's sense of itself and its place in the world was bound to change and European European membership had always been always been presented to the British people and seen by them as a bit of a failure strategy we've lost our Empire we have to find
Starting point is 00:03:55 this new role and we don't like it we have to jump into bed with the Europeans and I think once particular to the Falklands once people started waving the flag again, then you'd get people saying, well, actually, maybe we don't need Europe. And I think that was absolutely transformative for Britain in our lifetimes. And is it coincidence then that our current crop of leaders probably came of age? Yes. Sorry, no, it's not coincidence. Yes, you're right. I think our current leaders are completely different, aren't they, from the people who preceded them,
Starting point is 00:04:30 who were steeped in that world of post-imperial decline, who had lived through it, who had been born in the age of empire and had seen it fall apart around them. If you know your John le Carré in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the mole, I won't say who the mole is. The mole, one of the things that motivates him to give all the secrets to the Russians is that he feels cheated by the loss of empire. He was bred to run the empire and it's all been taken away. And there's this sense of Britain being irredeemably seedy and broken and rubbish. And for people of the sort of Ted Heath, James Callahan, Harold Wilson generation and those
Starting point is 00:05:15 just below them, those a bit younger as well, I think that was fundamental to their sense of British identity and Britain's destiny. Britain's destiny was a kind of reckoning with that and an admission of it. And our future lay in accepting it and becoming, you know, a very big Belgium. And I think for politicians who came of age in the 80s and afterwards, their sense was very different. They remembered the Falklands. They remembered Thatcher and the handbag. politicians who came of age in the 80s and afterwards, their sense was very different. They remembered the Falklands, they remembered Thatcher in a handbag.
Starting point is 00:05:52 You know, Blair always talked about Britain being a leader and, you know, standing shoulder to shoulder with the Americans, flying over to Bush's State of the Union address and accepting the congratulations of Congress and all that kind of thing. And this sort of Churchillian rhetoric that Blair and Thatcher were both very comfortable with. So I think without all that, you wouldn't have, we wouldn't be where we are now. When you've been looking at modern recent British history, are you, do you buy into that narrative though about how the sort of swings, you know, the 50s, the 70s being a nightmare and the 80s being a restoration of national pride? How much do you think that is us trying to talk about Britain strategically on the world stage?
Starting point is 00:06:35 What was the experience of normal Brits, do you think? Oh, of course, it's completely different. People's experience at any given moment is not the narrative that historians tell is it i mean we we superimpose that onto the messy reality of people's lives so you know i've written books about the 70s and 80s and whatnot and whenever i talk about them people often say well i sort of i know what you're saying but my life and then they'll rattle off all the facts of their life which was completely different um so in a way you know that you're just painting a very very broad picture that doesn't necessarily match the circumstances of an individual or an individual family's day-to-day life but i still think you can make general points i mean you can make an
Starting point is 00:07:23 observation in the 1970s for example You have this strange paradox where most people were better off than ever been they led more affluent lives more comfortable They went on foreign holidays. They had central heating all of these kinds of things and yet at the same time they had an intense sense of disappointment with Life hadn't quite measured up to their expectations in the 50s and 60s. They felt that Britain itself was falling behind, falling apart, more violent, more divided, all of those kinds of things.
Starting point is 00:07:54 I mean, again, that is a generalisation, but I think it does capture something of the spirit of the time. And writing about these periods very intimately in sort of very great detail, you do get a sense of, at a given moment, the conversation is about X, Y and Z, and then almost imperceptibly, a few years later, it's about A, B and C. It's about something different,
Starting point is 00:08:16 and the obsessions are different, and the kind of flavour, I can't really put it any other way, the flavour of the national conversation feels different. I mean, as we all know from our own lifetimes, the flavour of the national conversation in 2007, let's say, was very different from 2015. And it's actually charting those changes, the obsessions that people have, their anxieties will change, their fantasies will change, that's one of the interesting aspects of writing about the very recent past.
Starting point is 00:08:47 Speaking about writing about the very recent past, what are your sources? I mean, how do you go about writing about when there's a ginormous reservoir of people to talk to and newspapers? Well, first of all, I don't do people to talk to at all. Some people do, but I don't do it at all. I have done it for other things, and I'm just suspicious of it as a historical tool.
Starting point is 00:09:14 People's recollections are generally wrong. And if you're talking to politicians, you're obviously getting a very carefully manicured um uh almost too self-reflective view of the past but also if you're trying to write the history of an entire country i mean who do you talk to where do you start how are you going to select your housewife in bolton to be representative so i don't do that at all. I use mass observation, which came in the 1980s after disappearing at the end of the Second World War. I use newspapers a lot, published diaries.
Starting point is 00:09:54 I mean basically the issue is there's far too much stuff. So it's simply a matter of trying to get what you think is a reasonable balance. Some things are self-indulgent. There's no real Should we say ideological justification of using Kenneth Williams's diaries, but they're good fun and he's a very amusing You know spectator So it'd be mad not to But I try to be pretty eclectic. You know, pop magazines, politicians' diaries. You know, I do a lot about sport.
Starting point is 00:10:34 You know, I'll do sort of deep dives into things. So the Falklands War, obviously, veterans' accounts. But also tons of the sort of cabinet papers. With the last book, you know, all basically Margaret Thatcher's papers have all been digitised. So there's no, I mean, you could spend your entire life sort of awash in Thatcher, which some people would really get off on, but there's a point at which you have to call a halt. But also, unlike lots of historians working in previous, earlier periods, I mean, you've got like hard data, you've got job figures on them.
Starting point is 00:11:06 Yes, yes. I mean, are you part statistician? I tell you what I use a lot is opinion polls. The two things that people generally get sort of cross about, they don't like me using, are newspapers and opinion polls. Generally because both of those things will present a picture that sometimes people don't like me using, are newspapers and opinion polls. Generally because both of those things will present a picture that sometimes people don't want to hear. So people may have particularly an image of Britain
Starting point is 00:11:33 as more progressive than it was. If you say, well, you know, at the end of the 1960s, New Society magazine did a really big survey and they asked people, what's the one thing you, what are the two things you don't like about Britain in the 60s? And young and old, rich and poor, they all gave the same answer. There's too many immigrants and we don't like
Starting point is 00:11:50 the abolition of the death penalty. And sometimes I would mention this in talks and stuff and people would say, oh, that can't be right. You know, people, we weren't like that. Nobody I knew was like that. And the other thing is newspapers. People say, oh, well, the newspapers are all biased, aren't they? They're just trying to brainwash people and all the rest of it.
Starting point is 00:12:09 But actually, I think newspapers, particularly the letters pages, can often give you a really fun view of what people are interested in. I mean, the letters that people write to the Daily Express or something at the turn of the 1980s look in many ways absolutely demented but they're just a really fun and I think not entirely unrepresentative source so yeah I do use a lot of I mean the opinion polls particularly where it comes to stats because you asked about stats I mean where would you wait you know there's no cutoff you could, you could spend your life awash in facts and figures. You know, inflation, unemployment, interest rates, all of these kinds of things.
Starting point is 00:12:51 And they do make a, you know, what the interest rate is, as anyone who owns a house or has a loan will know, makes a huge difference to your well-being, to your sense of how the country is faring and how you're faring in it. Is it too soon to write history of the 80s and the 90s? No. I mean, this is a sort of, you know, this is one of these things that people discuss, don't they, when they're studying historiography against their will in their second year at
Starting point is 00:13:23 university. When does history start and end? I think about 30 years is about right. AJP Taylor wrote about the interwar years in, I think, 1965, so similar sort of interval. I think there's just a sense after about 30 years of the dust settling a bit. So writing about Thatcherism now in the 80s now doesn't feel still more politicised than I thought it would be
Starting point is 00:13:48 but it doesn't feel quite as intense as it would have done 10 or 20 years ago a lot of people are dead makes it easier to write about them when they're dead because you don't feel bad about saying what you think and there's just a sort of sense of some of
Starting point is 00:14:05 those stories have clearly ended, I think, when people have died. You know, we know what happened to them, you know where it got to. You know what happened to Thatcher and the Conservative Party and the Labour Party. So you can tell the story of the 80s with a sense of where it's going in a way that you couldn't have done in 1995, let's say. It's weird though, isn't it? I I mean if the 2016 referendum had gone two points differently so remain at one, you'd be writing different history books. I would be writing different history, absolutely right. So I wrote the very first book in this series that I wrote, the European issue came up because it was the late
Starting point is 00:14:39 50s early 60s when Macmillan made the first bid to enter and I often think, I've often thought about it since the 2016 referendum that that book and the next book which was about Wilson's attempt to join again Vito Verde Gaulle and the third book which had us actually joining that all three of those I wrote with the assumption that we would be in forever that That the questions that I was asking were, why didn't we join earlier? What went wrong with the early applications? And then I would write about the celebrations. I've got, I mean, I can see it now.
Starting point is 00:15:18 I've got the passage talking about the celebrations when we went in in 1973. It didn't occur to me to write about the people who were really down in the dumps, you know, who were cross about it. And it didn't occur to me that the question that I should be asking was, why were more people not enthused? Why were so many people so sceptical? You know, which is obviously the question you'd ask now, but you're absolutely right, you'd only ask that question now because of that two
Starting point is 00:15:45 point difference so it's a very good example about how it's a very good just a great example of how the vagaries of you know sophology in the present can change the questions that you're asking about the past so you admit you know that's good that you're writing this is contemporary history it's for you it's it all, it's affected by your experience moving through the Isn't that true of all history? Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think that's absolutely true of all history, I don't think that it's more obvious for me
Starting point is 00:16:13 but it happens in a more subtle way with anybody who writes about it and, you know, I see this all the time as a reviewer, so, you know I review history books for the Sunday Times and I get to, it's a great treat because I know I review history books for the Sunday Times and I get to it's a great treat because I get to read lots of stuff outside my period and I spend a lot of time talking to the literary editor about the obsessions that people have so basically every book we get
Starting point is 00:16:36 about the Victorians now is about you know it's either about empire and imperial crimes or it's about people cross-dressing or it's about sort of uproarious attempts to subvert the Victorian stereotype. People don't write books about Victorian politics or sort of straight Victorian history. And that is, of course, you know, that's contemporary writing. It's writing about the 21st century disguised as historiography, which in a sense all history is. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History we uncover the epic stories
Starting point is 00:17:23 that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits there are new episodes every week totally um let's you mentioned Thatcher she looms so large over modern British politics. Yeah. Is it... I mean, how easy was it to try and do a sort of dispassionate judgment on Thatcher?
Starting point is 00:18:14 I mean, but the myths of both the right and the left are so powerful. They are, aren't they? I mean, I always would say to people, Thatcher's the last great man in history. She's the last great... That's the last bit of great man history you're allowed, particularly if you're very political. And oddly, particularly if you're left-wing and you hate Thatcher. Because if you're left-wing and you really hate her,
Starting point is 00:18:36 people tend to believe that she is personally responsible for... De-industrialisation. Precisely. For these forces, which palpably she's not really personally responsible for at all, because they happened everywhere and because they were happening already. So in some... When I first started writing this,
Starting point is 00:18:54 it was an idea that I actually got from doing a TV series about the 80s. We had the idea of how could you do it with no Thatcher? Could you just take her out completely, not even mention her? What would it look like? And I thought, obviously I didn't do that for the book because she's such a great character, she's a great character, she's kind of a Dickensian character,
Starting point is 00:19:14 but it's a really interesting thought experiment. You know, write the story of Britain in the 1980s without mentioning her name or anything she did. How would, you know, how would your work on that change? And actually, once I started thinking like that, then it became almost easier to put her back in as a historical actor, but one who's imprisoned by circumstance,
Starting point is 00:19:36 who's not the architect of the story, but is trapped within it, who's a professional woman who has to make decisions about what's she going to wear, how's she going to look just like any other woman in the sort of new workplace of the 1980s and as somebody who's
Starting point is 00:19:56 wrestling with a, you know, she's been dealt a set of cards and she has to play them and you know that I mean, I remember Margaret Thatcher when I was a child, but Jesus, I was six, seven, eight. Hardly born. It would be freakish.
Starting point is 00:20:13 There were a lot of such people, but I wasn't one of these people who spent all my time thinking about Margaret Thatcher when I was young. I mean, I was thinking about Star Wars or something, but not Margaret Thatcher. So I didn't feel that I came to it with a lot of baggage. And having written about, you know, the Millens and the Wilsons and so on, she was so, she was just fun to write about.
Starting point is 00:20:33 She was so refreshing. She was so direct and acerbic and abrasive and at times sympathetic or intensely annoying. You know, she was just, she's a larger than life figure. I know, she's a larger-than-life figure. I mean, that's a dreadful cliche, but if historical characters were top Trump's cards, she'd be a good card to get. You know, there's a lot of... She's a technicolour character,
Starting point is 00:21:00 and I think doing her that way as a character rather than as a caricature was the kind of key to it do you think that so she's a great character but did she have more agency was she sort of more more powerful than your wilsons and your carahans and these macmillans and other other prime ministers i mean was was was the did she bend the course of British history more than the Prime Minister? Yes, she did. Okay. She did. You know, if you take Wilson, for example, Wilson won three out of four elections that he fought.
Starting point is 00:21:36 He was, you know, Prime Minister twice. He was a huge figure. I mean, the huge figure in the 60s and 70s. But when he left, you know, I've written written thousands of probably thousands of pages about Harold Wilson but when he left you know what was left it was as though he'd never been um now with Thatcher you really felt the imprint I think she was just intensely forceful. I think she had a very, very... She was tactically far more flexible than her enthusiasts or her detractors would allow. So she was perfectly happy to do U-turns,
Starting point is 00:22:18 despite the ladies not returning stuff. But strategically, she was extremely consistent. She had a very clear vision of what sort of country she wanted to lead. How to get there was a different matter. But she was ruthlessly opportunistic and absolutely unsentimental about using power and about her own political survival, the survival of the Tory party. And she had a kind of, I think the other thing that's really distinctive about Margaret Thatcher,
Starting point is 00:22:59 I mean obviously there's a whole issue of her being a woman, which is, I'll park that for the moment, but I think the really distinctive thing is her moralism which is utterly at odds with the kind of macmillan wilson heath era so she had been brought up in this intensely religious background methodist background where she would go to church or chapel sometimes three or four times a week on a sunday she was sunday school and then various sort of things because her father was a lay preacher She grew up in this atmosphere this religious atmosphere religious language and when she became Tory leader that was what a lot of people found both invigorating Shocking is that she would use this language of good and evil
Starting point is 00:23:42 Completely unselfconsciously and unironically so people would interview her i mean the sunday times interviewed her once and she they said why did you go into politics and she said well because i believe in the conflict between good and evil and i believe that one day good will triumph i mean harold wilson would have never said something like this you know you can't imagine david cameron saying anything like this or boris or you know i mean even tony blair who is much more religious than most, would not have said it. She believed, you know, she genuinely thought
Starting point is 00:24:13 that socialism was the way of wickedness. And, of course, her enthusiasts loved that, because, for once, they were the goodies. Somebody was telling them they were on the side of virtue in there but there's one reason i think why the left absolutely abhorred her was that they were used to being unchallenged on the moral high ground and here you had a prime minister who said actually i'm i'm fighting the fight of righteousness and you are villains who are undermining you know all this sort of stuff and that made her completely different from most other politicians.
Starting point is 00:24:46 I mean, people in her own cabinet would kind of, you know, they would physically recoil when she sort of embarked on these lectures. But if you see her, you can see her speech notes that she would write for the party conference speeches. And she would write these huge screeds about the idea of individual responsibility and how that comes from God and all of this sort of stuff. And of course her speechwriters would cut every word of it because they were just embarrassed by it
Starting point is 00:25:17 and they didn't know what to do with it. But she absolutely believed it. And that made her very different from most politicians. And she allied that with two other things. One is the opportunism, the sort of ruthless, tactical cunning. And the third thing, which is very telling, is the populism. She framed everything within the language of the family and the household. I know how to handle a family budget.
Starting point is 00:25:40 You probably know yourself, so you know. And she'd gone about inflation. She presented in this way, which is where being a woman came in very handy because she could play that card and that again was something that a lot of politicians just couldn't do so she had all these sort of qualities for want of a better word and she was a sort of she was a very powerful electoral package in a way that only really I suppose Blair has matched since her What about when you're writing
Starting point is 00:26:12 when you've been writing these histories these modern histories do you is it easy to get obsessed by the trees and ignore the wood because I have historians coming here and talking about demographics and climate breakdown Is it easy to get obsessed by the trees and ignore the wood? I mean, do you... Because I have historians coming here and talking about demographics
Starting point is 00:26:28 and climate breakdown and AI. And do you also... Do you decide on some kind of culture? Is that your primary interest, is the culture and political history? Or are you trying to also map these kind of gigantic substructural change like tech that's going on as well? It's a huge task. The truthful answer is, yes, i do try to do those things um but it's kind of difficult in a in an 800 page
Starting point is 00:26:50 book about three or four years so you know you're trying to keep the rhythm of several different or the pace of several different stories in your mind at once so one is the level of political froth which as we all know is in the long run trivial um and below that uh the bigger things so you mentioned tech um in the most recent book i have a chapter about computers and a lot of people quite surprised when i said i was going to do a whole chapter shortly a page um and i I'd say, no, I think this is really, I think, because I mean, I do think no one will care in the long run about the miners' strike, maybe not even the Falklands War. But the advent of the computer, in terms of a computer, is something we all use, you know, it's colossal. And I remember it happening. I remember everybody in my class, that moment when nobody had ever
Starting point is 00:27:44 seen a computer, and that moment where nobody had ever seen a computer and that moment where everybody had a Commodore 64 or a Spectrum or a BBC Micro and that of course is merely a trivial symptom of a much deeper change in the way we relate to each other and the way we work and all the rest of it.
Starting point is 00:28:00 So I do try to weave some of that in but of course that's a classic example of a story that hasn't ended. Yeah. So, you know, it's hard to say exactly where that's going. But, yes, you know, there is a real danger of... I have an awful lot of trees in my books because they're designed to be immersive.
Starting point is 00:28:24 You know, the weather on a given day, who was top of the First Division, all of that kind of thing, and kind of giving you... building up the texture of life. But certainly, I sometimes think you can absolutely get too close to all this stuff and you can suffer from an overload of information. And actually, that's one thing that... being not just a historian but a newspaper columnist um i always think that actually a real asset for writing columns or talking about contemporary politics is is not overloading
Starting point is 00:28:56 yourself with information most of which is wrong or misleading but actually shutting off from it and knowing so i don't want to say knowing as little as possible, but sometimes the more you know, the more you become absorbed by the minutiae, the more you lose sight of the bigger picture and you lose the kind of clarity of vision. So trying to keep all those, I don't know what metaphor I'm on now with clarities of vision, trees and woods
Starting point is 00:29:20 and balls in the air, but trying to keep all those balls in the air is the trick, I guess. So when you're, it's so interesting, because you're the great expert of modern British history. You looked at how we've evolved and developed. And you just said political stuff's all froth. And I kind of agree with that as well.
Starting point is 00:29:36 It just strikes me that, you know, I come from a family of political journalists who would just get obsessed by a party conference speech. Yes. And I think, did that make any difference compared to what the woman down the road was doing, which was developing a cancer drug? You know, like, what has...
Starting point is 00:29:50 What do you think, the big... Like, what have been the big things that have driven change over the period that you've studied? I mean, has it been decisions made by men and women in white? No, no. You don't think so? No, of course not. I mean, here's a way to think about it.
Starting point is 00:30:06 The Victorian period, right? I mentioned the Victorian period earlier. Think of the Victorian period when Britain was at the height of its international influence. When, you know, colossal change. The railways, cities, Dickens, you know, newspapers, steamships, all that stuff. Who cares now who was Prime Minister in 1874? Who knows the details of Gladstone's second government? I mean that stuff is no more compelling than the details of the reign of a Byzantine
Starting point is 00:30:41 Emperor from the seventh century or something. I mean those things might be interesting, you know, to some people and they might enjoy it, but it doesn't feel, it doesn't have, you know, weight. It doesn't seem to have significance. And I think, you know, the funny thing about my books and the way I write is that I do give a lot of weight to all those things and I do, I enjoy the narrative, but it doesn't really matter. You know, heretical as it might sound, it didn't actually really matter that, did it matter that Margaret Thatcher won in 1979 and not Labour?
Starting point is 00:31:19 Probably not. Would Britain be in a different position now? Would our lives be different? No, because as you say, the technological changes, the sort of deep cultural and economic shifts, have nothing to do with politicians. And that's often... But we all like to collude in this fantasy.
Starting point is 00:31:36 Totally. We want someone to be in charge. We want someone to be in charge. But also I think there's a fine line between an ideology, a historical explanation, a conspiracy theory. And we all like to believe that somebody is to blame. You know, the evil Tories plotted all this and they destroyed our industry.
Starting point is 00:31:58 Well, I think we want to believe that Rupert Murdoch can click his hands because otherwise it's all a bit scary. It is, precisely, of course. If no one's in charge, then it's, oh my God. If JFK really was just shot by Lee Harvey Oswald, how worrying is that, that the world can spin because of the actions of one madman? George W. Bush, it was just a bit of a bumbling fool.
Starting point is 00:32:16 There was no overarching conspiracy. There was no plan. Just a bit of an idiot. Yeah. And he didn't know what was going on. Yeah. I mean, you sort of see this now with Cummings and Brexit
Starting point is 00:32:25 oh yeah people want Cummings to be the evil genius to be the mastermind even if they hate him they think it's nice that somebody I remember
Starting point is 00:32:32 Peter Mandelson do you remember oh he's the dark art the prince of darkness yeah it's like oh he's nice he's a dude he's wandering around
Starting point is 00:32:39 like everyone else I mean I just don't I don't see that any of these people have agency really well the more you know about politics and politicians and political history as you do about of Medieval kings or anybody else is that they're fumbling arguing squabbling, you know
Starting point is 00:32:53 Trying to make sense of the world and and the most successful ones the best opportunists but but that's all it is and Yeah, but that's not what we want to I mean you could write history books with no people in them and people do sort of guns germs and steel and all the rest of it it's a successful genre I mean it's not what I am particularly interested in and and actually the sort of human comedy as it were I mean that's what often strikes me about my books are a succession of people getting things wrong, making tits of themselves in various ways, you know, political careers crashing and burning after having appeared to soar into the heavens.
Starting point is 00:33:33 And that's fun because there's a sort of... I think there is a kind of human comedy aspect to politics, which is often what political journalists really like about it. There's sort of... There are multiple ironers. These people who think they're, you know, they're the big I am, as it were, and actually they've just got feet of clay like all the rest of us.
Starting point is 00:33:56 And we project onto them all this meaning. But it doesn't really exist. There you go. So what's the latest book? So the latest book is called Who Dares Wins, and it's Britain 1979 to 1982, and I believe available in all good bookshops. It sure is. Go and buy it, everyone.
Starting point is 00:34:15 Thank you very much for coming to the podcast. Thank you, Dan. Thank you. I hope you enjoyed the podcast. Just before you bit of a favor to ask i totally understand if you don't want to become a subscriber or pay me any cash money makes sense but if you could just do me a favorites for free go to itunes or wherever you get your podcast if you give it a five star rating and give it an absolutely glowing review purge yourself give it a glowing review i'd really appreciate that it's tough weather laura the out there. And I need all the fire support I can get. So that will boost it up the charts. It's so tiresome. But if you could do it, I'd be very,
Starting point is 00:34:52 very grateful. Thank you.

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