The Rest Is History - 5. 1981

Episode Date: November 16, 2020

As a new series of The Crown arrives on Netflix, returning viewers to the 1980s, we look back at the year many Britons consider the worst in living memory. Rocketing unemployment, riots in major cities and a country governed by the most divisive prime minister in post-war British history made 1981 a year to forget. Amidst the gloom was the wedding of Prince Charles to Lady Diana and the greatest Ashes fightback England cricket fans had ever seen. So what can we learn from a closer analysis of 1981? Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishist L.P. Hartley famously said, the past is a foreign country. They do things differently there. But do they? Today on our episode of The Rest Is History, we want to look at the very recent past prompted by the return to netflix of the crown but before we come to that uh and i know dominic you'll be straining at the least about this because uh

recent british history is very much your subject isn't it so you're gonna have you're gonna have lots to say um i just wanted to say uh to thank everybody who's uh who's listening for um having helped us get off to such a great start it's's fantastic. We were a bit nervous about launching this, but we're thrilled that so many of you are out there, are listening and emailing in and tweeting and contributing. And please do keep that going. Yeah, it's quite a surprise, isn't it, Tom? I was expecting a torrents of abuse.

Well, I mean, I obviously get torrents of abuse naturally on a sort of daily basis anyway. So this is a nice break for me to well i was i was kind of expect i was kind of expecting tumbleweed to be honest so um so neither abuse nor tumbleweed so do please um keep uh you know keep letting us know what you think um should we should we read out some tweets that'd be a very good idea yeah should we engage with the with the great british public yes we had somebody, Alex Burson, he wrote, thanks for doing it. The rest of history is great.

For your amusement, Stephen the Great of Moldova was sanctified by the Orthodox Church in the 1990s and is now Stephen the Great and saint. He had four wives, as saint should, and was known to be quick to spill blood, but he built churches and defended Christianity. He was quite great. It's just that the saint is both a late addition

and amusing in the context of episode one. So there you go. Yeah, I mean, being a saint and great, I mean, that's a square in the circle, isn't it? Yeah, I mean, he did a bit of everything, didn't he? Yeah. Polymath. We also have a message from Andrew Walker.

He's been wondering about academic reassessment of Nero. Oh, good, good. Academic reassessment of Nero. That's very much my thing. This person exists. He's not you. Oh, good, good. Academic reassessment of Nero. That's very much my thing. This is definitely, this person exists. He's not you under a false name, Tom. My sock puppet.

He's heard about it on another podcast, Boo Hiss. It amounts to, well, he was rather popular with the plebs. People after him invoked him to boost their appeal and his critics were fake news from the swamp. Yeah, I mean, basically, yeah, can't disagree with that. to boost their appeal and his critics were fake news from the swamp yeah i mean basically yeah can't disagree with that um and uh and then we got lovely a lovely comment from um emma salisbury um i'm listening to this right now it's rather nostalgically like being at a friendly dinner party with fellow historians even though tom holland and dominic sandbrook can't hear me

chiming in so that that speaks somebody who's clearly never been at a dinner party with historians. The mood of bitterness and rancour. Yes, well, bitterness and rancour is what we're all about. So anyway, you can, this dinner party, this friendly dinner party, do join in. You can chime in, tweet us, hashtag the rest is history. And also very excitingly, we've got an email address now. Rest is history pod at gmail.com. Rest is history pod at gmail.com. And I like that idea of the ultimate historical dinner party. I mean, I think that would be a good idea for a future episode. Say what kind of people from across the range of history who would make the ideal dinner party? Genghis Khan.

No, he'd be terrible. He'd chop your head off and drink out of your skull. That's a terrible idea. Anyway, we're not going to get onto that. Let's get onto The Crown. Yes, let's. Because I'm guessing you have, do you have views on this? Have you seen The Crown? As you well know, Tom, I have never seen The Crown. I have not seen so much as a minute of The Crown. Why would I? I mean, I spend, you The Crown. I have not seen so much as a minute of The Crown. Why would I? I mean, I spend, you know, my working day thinking about Harold Wilson or whatever.

And Dominic, has the fact that you have never seen The Crown, has it prevented you from writing about it? No, obviously not. I mean, that would be anathema to all I stand for. Have you just written an enormous spread about the 80s to coincide with the new series of The Crown set in the 80s? No, I haven't, but I have given a long interview to BBC History magazine about it, but they know I haven't seen it. So they describe it to me over the phone. They tell me what happens and I tell them what I think of it. I think it

works very well. And just to make it clear to the listeners, you've written a highly acclaimed series of books about modern British history that that exactly cover the the span of the decades that yeah exactly cover and your most recent book was um it was what it was kind of like 7 000 page volume about three the first three years of the thatcher government so from 79 to 82. So bang in the middle of that is the summer of 1981, which of course has the Royal Wedding. Yeah. Well, the Royal Wedding is obviously a big deal for the Crown, isn't it? Diana and all that.

Carry on. And it's a bigger deal for the Crown than it is for your book. It would be fair to say. It is mentioned in my book. I mean, there is a whole section about the Royal Wedding, but I'm kind of more, I mean, to be fair to say. Well, it is mentioned in my book. I mean, there is a whole section about the royal wedding, but I'm kind of more, I mean, to be honest with you, Tom, cakes, dresses, you know, page boys, that sort of stuff fills me with utter gloom and misery. So when I talked about it in my book, it was more, what did people make of

it? What was the meaning of it um and also actually putting it against the background of all this other stuff which is so interesting which is going on in 81 so the riots the recession the cricket of course which we'll come to later um this sort of tumultuous year you know 1981 is one of those years i suppose a little bit like sort of 1968 or something that has a meaning beyond... Or 2020, perhaps. Or 2020, exactly. I think you can make a reasonable case that 1981 was the grimmest year in our lifetimes. And actually grimmer than 2020, because 2020 is worldwide, whereas 1981 was just, you know, it was Britain that was uniquely in a terrible mess.

So, I mean, the key thing about the Royal Wedding, everyone said it was like a fairy tale. And the irony about that is partly that the backdrop is this Britain in a state of complete turmoil, unemployment, rioting, and so on. But also the fact, of course, that the marriage was going to go terribly wrong. And I just wondered, before we get on to

the kind of historical context for 1981 provides what's your view as a historian of modern britain about the way in which the story of the royal family has kind of become like the matter of britain that you know like the matter of britain in the middle ages was the story of king arthur that in a way for lots of people the story of king arthur was was more real you know they knew more about that than they knew anything about you know what was actually happening in medieval england and there's a kind of slight sense with you know that globally what people know about british history is kind of you know and the story of diana in particular it's kind of like the modern matter of britain people know about the story of diana it's become this mythic story. Does that have any historical significance?

I mean, what does that say about Britain's role in the world? OK, so I think that's true of Diana, right? I think that's true that you can take the story of Diana and you can say, but you can also tease out sort of historical meanings about, you know, the sentimentalisation of British culture. Diana obviously played a big part in the sort of a new kind of, or a renewed kind of emotionalism in Britain's sort of public life, you know, sort of embracing aid sufferers and so on, you know, doing things that the monarchy or the public figures wouldn't have done 10 or 20 years earlier. So's sort of she is an important figure in that context

obviously but the royal family more generally i'm not so sure so i agree with you there are things that are that people care more about than the usual sort of political events sport is actually a really good example of that so a lot of people when they make sense of the recent past they don't think about general elections and governments. They think about World Cups and how their team got on and all that kind of thing. And music, again, you ask anybody about their youth or if they grew up in the 60s or the 70s, it's often music that they turn to as their cultural references.

And they'll say, well, the 60s ended when the Beatles broke up or the 70s ended when Sid V broke up or, you know, the 70s ended when, you know, Sid Vicious died or whatever it might be. People will look on those things as the sort of chronological structuring, I guess, for the recent past. So I'm not so sure that the monarchy is the key one that I would go for. I mean, maybe it's because I don't really care

that much about the sort of royal story. It's interesting you talk about music because actually the thing for me that's interesting about the 80s is that it's when I was a teenager so I was becoming kind of aware of politics. I remember there was not the Nine O'Clock News, which was a kind of satire show, and they did not the royal wedding. And it was kind of like the first disrespectful treatment of the royal family that I'd come across.

And I remember, you know, I was kind of 13, thought it was great. But what I also remember is that there was a series on, I think on Radio 1 at the time, it's called 25 Years of Rock, and it ran from 1955 to 1979. And it kind of set current affairs to a soundtrack of the music of that particular year. And it stopped in 79. It never went on into 1980, 1981 and so on. I was hugely disappointed about that. But what I was thinking now when you were talking about music and the tumultuous events of 81 is the way in which, you know, the really scarring experience was mass unemployment, inner city deprivation.

And the soundtrack to that you always get is Ghost Town. And that's kind of like, you know, the moment you hear that, that is early 80s Thatcherism. It just kind of conjures it up, doesn't it? Yeah, it does. I mean, I did a TV documentary about the 80s, and I can't remember if you used Ghost Town or not, but when we were doing it, we kind of went through and we said,

everybody expects that when we do the miners' strike, by law, by sort of UN-mandated law, you have to have two tribes, don't you? Yes, yes. So the footage is the Battle of Orgreave and two tribes is playing. And we sort of said, we need to steer clear of this as much as we can, although I think we probably did use Ghost Town.

So you're right, but that's true of older periods too, right? When you're doing mid-Victorian Britain, you always use Dickens. Yeah, but you're talking about music. Music is a kind of lingua franca, if you like. It's everybody understands what it means. Everybody has the same associations and so on. So I don't think it's actually that different from using literary sources from earlier periods to illustrate, you know, to sort of connote a particular time, a particular atmosphere, don't you think? of provided a soundtrack um that everyone remembers and recognizes um simply because the music industry has has grown so much and the ability of people to consume it has has grown exponentially and kind

of for that reason it it does kind of conjure up images so so you know rather like the royal family um britain has has been very central to the music industry so i would say that the story of the beatles is a kind of parallel to the story of Diana, that it's a kind of almost mythic tale that everyone kind of instinctively knows. And likewise, the story of music, the story of the royal family, the story of sport,

all of this is a kind of part of the fabric of recent history. And I just wonder, you know, is it part of that because that's what we remember, that's what we experienced most vividly, or is it more significant than that? Ah, that's a good question. Is it more significant than that?

I think there is a sort of a story about Britain's decline on the world stage and the way we sell ourselves to the world. We sell ourselves through pop culture now in a way that we wouldn't have done you know in let's say the 19th century so if you'd said to somebody in 19th century britain well the most important thing about this given moment is our tremendously rich tradition of musical and we will be remembered for our splendid novels um people would have laughed at you they'd have said that's not important at all whereas now

i think we do think these things are important and they are redolent of Britishness. So they're what we think matters. So when Danny Boyle did his 2012 Olympics opening ceremony, a lot of it was about Britain's tradition of music and storytelling and all the rest of it. That these things were kind of intrinsic to Britishness. So it's not surprising that when we tell the story

of the very recent past, it's those things that we look to because actually those things seem more sort of vital than you know the story of the rise and fall of Ted Heath's government which most people couldn't give a damn about and and yet I suppose one of the one of the things about um about the early 80s is actually that the politics is really kind of viscerally in your face in a way that perhaps it hadn't been at any other period. I mean, maybe in the, I don't know, in the Heath government with the three-day weekend. No, far more than in the Heath government. I think politics in the 80s is such a great narrative story. And the divisions in Britain in 81, between North and South, between country and inner city?

I mean, give a sense of how divided the country was. I think enormously divided. And, you know, for people who don't, for younger listeners who don't remember it, Margaret Thatcher had come in in 79 after sort of perceived years of decline. And she basically said she was going to administer this shock therapy, this sort of harsh medicine that would turn Britain around. And after two years, everything seemed to have got incalculably worse.

Britain was in recession. We had unemployment at more than heading towards 4 million, effectively. Young people in particular couldn't get jobs. You had riots, first of of all in brixton in april and then spreading around the country in the summer you had massive um unrest massive um rioting in northern ireland where you had the hunger strikes of republican prisoners in the maize prison you had this sort of sense that the whole country was coming unglued and that almost uniquely in western europe you know here was this sort of former imperial power this major industrial

nation that was just coming apart and people were sort of um that it was politically tearing itself apart i suppose so the government was the most unpopular government since records began the party the opposition party was incredibly bitterly divided. And there was this real sense of, which far greater, I think, than anything even over Brexit, of rancour and of sort of, you know, hostility. A real sense of the stakes being so high. And the stakes being the survival of the United Kingdom, you know, the prosperity of you

and your family, you know, this is not a sort of, these are not symbolic issues. These are incredibly visceral kind of bread and butter issues. But you see, the reason why recent history is, I find it kind of challenging to get a handle on is that I lived through it. And I was in a idyllic Wiltshire village. And oddly, I now live in Brixton. So, you know, and Brixton was kind of the epicentre of police brutality and the rioting. But, you know, it might as well have been a million miles from me. And what I remember about the summer of 81 is that my mother was in hospital. My father said, you know, he had to look after me, didn't know what else to do.

He said, well, let's watch a test match. And I had no interest in cricket, had no interest in sport at all. That test match was headingly and it was one of the most transformative, remarkable cricket matches of all time. I know that people who are not interested in cricket um certainly people who are who are not british listening to this will be slightly bewildered by it but but it it there was this astonishing kind of fairy tale reversal

where england had been down and out they came they they they triumphed against all the odds over australia our old uh sporting rival um And Ian Botham, a figure who is now famous chiefly for supporting Brexit and having been raised by Boris Johnson to the House of Lords, was the hero of the hour. And that essentially changed my life because it persuaded me to take up cricket,

which has been one of the great loves of my life ever since. So that is how I remember 1981. So emotionally, emotionally personally that's that's my stake in it um i i had no personal experience of riots or unemployment or um or anything like that and it's kind of you know it makes you as what what's often said about the great events is that actually often and it's a point you make repeatedly throughout your books that often even when terrible things are happening,

most people are actually perfectly happy. Yeah, I think that's right, Tom. I mean, I think we should get on to the cricket in a second. I can't believe, by the way, it took you more than 15 minutes of this podcast to turn the conversation to Ian Botham. However, let's put Botham on one side. Let's come back to Botham and the cricket, because I think the cricket actually does have a proper historical historical significance which we can get into maybe after the break but before

that um yes it's a very strange thing writing about contemporary history because of course often when you're talking about you're talking to people who live through it now that's not a problem that you really have when you're doing you know dynasty or or rubicon or any of your books on the romans the Greeks or whatever. I mean, they're not around to tell you you're wrong. When I go to talk about my books, often, you know, there'll be people nodding in the audience and then there'll be other people who say, oh, but the 60s wasn't like that at all. Or the 70s, you know, wasn't like that. I mean, that's very common.

And I guess one of the things with being a historian of contemporary Britain is, first of all, you have to put your own experience on one side, but also you have to juggle your own job as the historian, which is to impose your pattern and to tell your story, but also the complexity of all these kind of individual stories. Now, that's not really something that you have to confront as an ancient historian because you don't have many sources. So you don't have all the individual stories

of all the people who are unrepresentative. That's true. That's true. But I think that one of the fascinating things about ancient history often is the glimpses you get occasionally of people leading their normal lives. Right. And it could be preserved on tombstones. It could be preserved in a poem. You know, the hints of what it's like to just go out and lie in a field while civil war is going on all around you. Give us an example. Well, actually, the example that always sticks in my mind comes from the letters of Cicero.

Cicero, of course, is intimately involved in the convulsions that ends the Roman Republic. But there's a letter in which he writes about a house he owns and it's got a crack. You know, a crack has opened up and he's a bit worried about this. You know, how's he going to repair it? And the idea that even amid all the events that Cicero was intimately involved in, he's worrying about kind of DIY repairs and things like that.

What's he going to do? I think that that's expressive of a fundamental truth that life carries on. It goes on. There's's kind of famous hardy poem isn't there which i think he wrote where he he says um do you know what let's let's go for a break and i'll look that um that hardy poem up and i'll read it to you when we come back i'm marina hyde and i'm richard osmond and together we host the rest is entertainment it's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews,

splash of showbiz gossip, and on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com.

Welcome back, everybody. I think Tom has a poem for us. I do. It's the first poem that we've had on The Rest Is History. It's by Hardy and it's called In Time of the Breaking of Nations. I'm going to read the third verse and it's Yonder a maid and her white come whispering by Wars annals will cloud into night air their story die so you know girls and boys will hang out with each other even though war's going on but interestingly the first verse only a man harrowing clods in a slow silent walk with an old horse that stumbles and nods half asleep as they stalk so hardly say you know that people will be plowing with horses till the

end of time and that obviously isn't true so no things do change that's a good example like this at the time i was thinking one before um just before the break so the the only source from the day that alexander the great died was a babylonian astrological diary kept by a priest and he and it's all about the weather so um he sort of says the king died. Meanwhile, it was very cloudy and overcast and bloody. And he gives more attention to the weather than he does. And that's how most of us think about politics and the world, isn't it?

It's apocryphal, isn't it, that on the 14th of July, Louis XVI's diary read, nothing much happened. Yeah, I think that probably is. I think maybe it was the record of game or something i think that's what i think that's what all kings post about 1700 are supposed to have written about major events anyway back back back to back back to 81 um yes you you were going to say that actually the um that the the cricket in 1981 was of immense historical significance which i'd love to be reassured on that because that would be great to learn. I think it is of great historical significance. So the news for Britain since the late 60s had been pretty awful. So although most people are actually

better off than they'd ever been, the sort of headlines were always bad. So from about 1967 onwards, which is when Harold Wilson devalued the pound, governments had been constantly in trouble and everything had been bad for Britain. And I think at the end of the 1970s, you started to get this sense that people were thirsting for some good news. So the first sign of that, I think, was the reaction to the SAS's raid on the Iranian embassy, which they liberated from a siege in 1980. And you have this almost hysterical reaction from the tabloids and so on, that Britain is great again, we're a top nation, all of this kind of stuff. And then you see it again twice in 1981. Once is the royal wedding, when we lead the world in pomp and pageantry. And the other time is this incredibly hysterical

reaction to winning one test match no three we won three we won three yes but it's the hellingley test that that sparks the reaction so it's the comeback and i think the funny thing about it is so botham who is the hero of the hour he had been the england captain he'd been this incredibly sort of youthful figure this sort of raging lion who's carrying all before him who's appointed in a captain then he then he doesn't win a match as captain he has the worst record of any test captain at that point in history and he's sacked from the captaincy and the day that he's sacked from the captaincy the headlines are juxtaposed with the images of rioting so they're the two main stories and they're both basically the same story and that story is britain

has been great but now it's rubbish it's tearing itself apart it can't win cricket matches its cities are in flames all is sort of disaster and then both them of all people the sort of incarnation of conservative working-class england turns it around doesn't he in this extraordinary sort of herculean feat. And the press are beside themselves. We are top nation again. Then just a couple of weeks later, you have the royal wedding. And of course, what that all lays the foundation for, I think,

is the sort of populist patriotism that you get with the Falklands. So it's basically laying, you know, these are all omens of what is to come a year later when the Falklands War happens. And these are elements of what you'd call Thatcherism, of Thatcher's sort of, you know, nationwide appeal to a particular audience, which Botham still incarnates. Well, it's often said of the Players' Association, which is the trades union of professional cricketers,

that it's the only trades union that's more right-wing than its employers. And, I mean, Botham becomes a kind of emblem for the triumph of Thatcherite, well, England, really, rather than Britain, Thatcherite England. He's a hunting, shooting, fishing man, and in due course he becomes a Brexiteer, and he's now in the House of Lords. Well, what's so interesting about him, right, is that he's forward-looking and backward-looking. So

if you take Ian Botham in 1981, you can sort of look forward and say Brexit and all of that kind of stuff. Or you can look back and you can say he's basically, what is he, an 18th century figure? You know, you can imagine him on the deck of HMS Victory. You know, the roast beef of old England.

I mean, his very nickname, Beefy, could not be more 18th century. And there was a very embarrassing stage where he went to L.A. to try and become James Bond, which I think will draw a curtain over that. But there is also another aspect to Botham which ties in interestingly with particularly the race riots. Is that Botham was great friends with Viv Richards, the, probably the, the, the, the great West Indies batsman, the greatest batsman of his day. Um, Botham was always slightly in his shadow. Uh, and interesting, another thing kind of, you know, looking forward to 2020 is that

the, uh, the trophy that West Indies and England compete for had been called the wisdom trophy is now the, the, um, the Viv Richards Ian Botham trophy. So there is also a sense in which he's looking forward to a future in which race relations will be less explosive than they were in 1981. Yeah, that's a really interesting point. And I think one reason that he got on so well with Viv Richards was they were both outsiders. And Botham felt very keenly his outsider status

in a game dominated by white public school boys so he he sort of he bonded with Viv Richards didn't he I think he wore the Jamaican colours in a kind of wristband to show his solidarity with with Richards yeah and that's really interesting because you have this sort of almost like black and white alliance of the outsiders against the old guard the Toffs that Botham and Richards felt were dominating the game. Okay, and so that's the kind of thing that a historian would do, is to pick up on a totemic figure like that and tease out aspects of him that perhaps you can then feed back into the broader context. Is that a fair thing to do? I mean, if we're looking at the Royal Wedding, we're looking

at the cricket, we're looking at the music, What does that tell us about trade union policy of the Thatcher government? Answer me that. Okay, you've sent me a challenge here. Well, I mean, my answer to that would be that Thatcher's trade union policy succeeded because most ordinary trade unionists generally agreed with the piecemeal bits of the... So each individual reform that she passed, individual trade unionists agreed with. piecemeal bits of the... So each individual reform that she passed, individual trade unionists agreed with. Their leaders didn't agree with them, but she obviously appealed to a kind of aspirational, working-class, you know, sort of skilled, respectable,

upwardly mobile working-class people, particularly in England. So your classic kind of Essex man. Now, Ian Botham's not an Essex man, but there are definitely parallels. And there's a kind of working class conservatism that Thatcher's union policy reaches out to, which is, you know, your union is actually, she says, your union is holding you back. Your collective loyalty is holding you back. You should think of yourself as an individual and get on and fight for a better life. That's what Ian Botham's about, isn't it? Right. And so opinions on, moving on from Botham,

I mean, actually opinions on Botham, but opinions on the Thatcher government and perhaps Mrs Thatcher particularly, it's a subject of history, but it still remains very, very intensely a matter of politics as well. Your opinion of what Mrs Thatcher did will define you politically today in 2020. That's absolutely right, Tom. You know, in a sense, you know, like the French Revolution, it's too early to tell. Well, I don't know about it's too early to tell. I'll tell you what a story I was when I first decided I was going to write these series of books about modern Britain. A friend of mine who's now professor of history at Leeds, he said to me, are you going to do the 80s?

And I said, oh, yeah, I have to. And he said, what are you going to do, Thatcher? I said, yeah, yeah, well, and he just kind of laughed and quite a sort of mocking way. And he said, everybody will really hate you, you know. And I said, why? He said, well, because I know you, you'll try to find, you know. And I said, why? He said, well, because I know you. You're trying to find, you know, you'll see both sides. You'll try to be balanced and all this. You can't be balanced about Thatcher. People just want you to hate her.

And of course, there's some truth in that. And my way of dealing with that partly was to say, of Thatcher, you know, in some ways, she's the last sort of great man. We talked about greatness in the first episode. Great man, great woman, sort of historiographical subject left. So people base their attitude to thatcher is they think she changed britain either for good or ill and and one of my big arguments is actually you know is that really true or is she really reflecting changes that are driven from below as it were you know if she died in 1978 would britain have been very different my argument is that it wouldn't that what happened actually

happened you know she was a symptom of the change rather than the cause My argument is that it wouldn't. That what happened actually happened, you know, she was a symptom of the change rather than the cause of it. So actually it doesn't matter whether you think she was brilliant or terrible. Because one of the arguments about what's happening at the moment with COVID and the way that it's affecting the North of England

much worse than the South is that this reflects kind of deep, deep, deep rooted trends for which Mrs. Thatcher is held responsible. The kind of the destruction of heavy industry, mining and so on. Do you think that there is, I mean, can we trace the threads of what happened in the 80s through to the incidence rates of infection and COVID? Or does that remain a kind of political rather than historical judgment I think that is a political judgment actually Tom and I two things

occurred to me about that one is first of all there's been a big divergence between north and south right long before that I mean I know you're a big fan of that book by Dan Jackson the Northumbrians yes and that really I mean you look at books like that that really brings alive just how different the north the experience in the north of England felt for hundreds of years from the experience in the south. You know, they're not, they were two nations, as it were, long before Margaret Thatcher had been a glint in Alderman Roberts's eye. And so your perspective is basically the Marxist one, that these are deep-rooted issues, that, you know, these are the great surging waves of history, and that someone like Mrs Thatcher is just the kind of the foam on the crest of the wave. That is exactly my position, Tom, and I'll give you an example of

that. You talked about the death of heavy industry. Does anybody seriously think that without Margaret Thatcher, you know, tens if not hundreds of thousands of people would every morning be going down pits to dig for coal. I mean, all that heavy industry has died in every other Europe, virtually every other European country. So the idea that it's all Margaret Thatcher's fault and it would happen, I mean, it might have happened more slowly. It might have happened less contentiously. It might have happened, you know, things might have worked out differently, but the basic story would still have been the same so in that sense yes that is kind of marxist history isn't it great big forces and all the rest of it i wonder whether um mrs satcher will

continue to hold this kind of demonic status or you know status of heroine depending on which side of the debate you stand because i i remember there was some, was it last year, maybe the year before, there was a really excellent series on the BBC about Mrs Thatcher. I'm so glad you mentioned that, Tom, because I was the consultant for that series. Okay, well, it was, I thought, Dominic, well, it was really excellent. And I think it didn't have any commentary at all, did it? It was just kind of... No, no presenter, no commentary, yeah.

Contemporary footage and interviewees. And I watched that with my daughter, who must have been, I don't know, 16 at the time or something, knew nothing about the subject at all. And her take on it was very much that of a kind of young feminist. Yeah. That she was watching a woman triumphing over these kind of chauvinist dinosaurs. And that was her take. Yeah, I think that story, that side of it, will definitely come out. You know, people will see her as a working woman surrounded by men in a way that they didn't. You know, 20 years ago,

they didn't see the femininity of Margaret Thatcher. Or indeed, they said, she's not really a woman at all, which nobody really would say now. I can see that even as I'm speaking, the producer is throwing texts at me to say she didn't like women, she didn't champion women and all this kind of thing. But in that respect, actually, Margaret Thatcher was typical of women of her type. People used to talk at the time about queen bees, about women who had got ahead in the 60s and 70s and then didn't pull up other women after them.

And psychologically, actually, you can sort of understand why some women behave like that. They thought, like Margaret Thatcher thought, well, I've got ahead on my own merits. Why should I, you know, institute affirmative action for other women? They should work just like I've worked. And there was always this tension between those women who'd been the first ones to get ahead, the kind of professional women,

and then those who came after them. But you're right. I think people will younger people i mean younger people won't care will they in 10 or 20 years time will they care about the falklands and the miners strike well but i think i think i think that what what my daughter's response to just to this that story having no sense of the broader politics of it was that there was a again a kind of mythic arc to the story of the woman who emerges from nowhere and and and becomes prime minister which

again aligns her with diana and it's interesting that the two you know we do have these two kind of mythic figures and they're both women in the 80s and i guess that that's what the crown will be will be riffing off that's what it's all about isn't it this series is all trading on that that yeah business isn't it i mean but? But it does suggest that a crucial aspect of how history is understood and in a sense consumed is as myth. The mythic qualities are themselves of historic significance.

That's absolutely right, Tom. And I think your, where you say the mythic qualities are of historic significance, that seems to me right too, because Margaret Thatcher, I mean, she was consumed, as it were, by the audience as a sort of, she's either Cruella de Vil, or she's the people, what do they call her, the Catherine the Great of Finchley? Yes.

Or she's, you know, her admirers see her as buddhica as britannia as elizabeth the first yeah so there there is there are these there's this constant myth of the the regal woman of the patriotic woman surrounded by men and the witch yeah and the witch and she which part you think she plays depends on your politics but people always put her into these sort of mythic roles don't they i mean nobody just says she's a politician like any other she's a working woman like any other they talk about her almost as this superhuman you know um on the same level that they talk about elizabeth the first or or or diana or booty well or diana because like diana likewise was similarly divided people.

You know, was she the queen of people's hearts or was she, you know, histrionic and lacking backbone? And again, the country was kind of divided on that. We don't really do that with men, though. No, no. I mean, maybe Henry VIII, but not many. There aren't many men that we talk about in the same sort of dualistic way. Yeah. We've run out of things to talk about, I think.

I think we have we have we have we have we exhausted the whole of the whole of the of the 80s? Do you know what's on this so much? We didn't talk about Tony Benn. We didn't talk about Bobby Sands, Ken Livingstone. But that just means we'll have to have another podcast all about 1981 in a few months time. Oh, I tell you what you haven't, what you haven't mentioned is, is, uh, Duran Duran and Simon Le Bon and the, the, the, the, my favourite quote, um, in your entire book on, on the Thatcher period. From all 7,000 pages. Which actually, because I was swatting for this, I've, I've got it here. Um, and, um And this is with reference to Union of the Snake and Hungry Like the Wolf. Simon Le Bon said, I've always liked poets like T.S. Eliot,

who are a little bit obscure. And that's definitely part of my style, lyrically. So there you go. The Wasteland could have been a... Planet Earth and the Wasteland. There we go. Proof Rock and Unionnew the Snake, yes. So this really is the podcast that reaches the parts that other parts don't.

We should have a Duran Duran reference every week, don't you think, Tom? Certainly a challenge. Then we can move on to Spandau Ballet and... Yeah, well, yes, a new Romantics. We'll try and quote a new romantics lyric every every week that would be an interesting challenge

and talking of every week I think it's time to close off for this week we'll be back next week Dom do you have

anything else to add lots but we don't have time so I'll probably have to just forego it but I hope you've all enjoyed it and we're going to

be out every Monday aren't we Monday morning Tom yeah Monday morning yeah that's the plan so please do subscribe and rate and review but only well only reviewed if it's a positive review obviously yes yeah just send those negative reviews um directly to tom um and uh and any questions, any thoughts, any comments, do contribute. The rest is historypod at gmail.com. Rest is historypod at gmail.com. That's how to contact us or you can message us on Twitter.

And we will be back next week. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com.