THEY always say that Margaret Thatcher was lucky in her enemies. First, there was the grumpy Ted Heath and wets such as Jim Prior. Next for decapitation: Argentina’s General Galtieri and his incompetent armed forces.
And her biggest prize was, of course, Arthur Scargill, the doomed leader of the shock troops of the labour movement, the once mighty National Union of Mineworkers.
Harold Macmillan, with his fond memories of fighting alongside Durham’s brave miners in the killing trenches of the First World War, once famously said that no Tory Prime Minister should pick a fight with the miners. A north-east of England MP and a backbench rebel during the bleak 1930s, “Supermac” was definitely never “One of Us”.
Thatcher was ready for a fight with Scargill from the day he was elected as NUM president in 1981. She would have read his MI5 file, which wasn’t far off the mark. Arthur was an old-fashioned Stalinist who wanted to use the miners as a battering ram to change the elected Government of the day.
The equally revolutionary first woman Prime Minister was equally determined. She wanted to change society itself by breaking the power of the trade unions in general and the NUM in particular.
I had a ringside seat at the fight to the death as industrial editor of The Sun, Rupert Murdoch’s brash tabloid edited outrageously by the foul-mouthed and hyperactive Kelvin MacKenzie, rightly called “MacFrenzy” by his much-abused staff.
As everyone knows, Rupert was hand in glove with Maggie throughout the strike. But we on the industrial staff never heard or spoke to him throughout the year-long dispute.
Like his equally close friendship with Tony Blair, Murdoch never leaves fingerprints when he deals with politicians. He hates personal publicity and only deals directly with his terrified editors and a few trusted old lags.
So, during the strike, he barked out telephone instructions, often from New York in the middle of the night, to Kelvin who went for Arthur in much the same way he had gone for the “Argies” two years earlier with his infamous “Gotcha” headline.
While phoning regular “bollockings” through to Mackenzie, Murdoch also worked the phones to his old lags in the building, making sure he kept a wary eye on his boy wonder editor. These would include Ken Donlan, his highly respected former news editor who, like most old Fleet Street hands, thought Kelvin was a bridge too far even in the “Street of Broken Dreams”.
His other contact was Sun political editor Trevor Kavanagh, a Brit who had been part of Rupert’s team in Australia that had cheerfully destroyed the career of Labour Prime Minister Gough Whitlam. Trevor, like all Murdoch executives, did not wait for the call before putting the boot into Rupert’s enemies – it saved time and energy.
Murdoch was like Don Revie when he was manager of Leeds United: he was quite happy to win ugly. Then, as now, he just wanted to win.
And Scargill, a hopeless industrial strategist, was no strategist at all when it came to dealing with Fleet Street’s finest.
As the industrial editor, I dealt on a daily basis with Geoff Kirk, head of public relations at the National Coal Board and the very eccentric Nell Myers at the NUM. Geoff, a lifelong Labour man and friend of coal, had never met or dealt with someone like Ian MacGregor, the hard-nosed American-Scot brought in by Maggie to sort Arthur out.
And Nell, if not from another planet, was from another continent being the daughter of a New York communist dockers’ leader made famous in On the Waterfront.
Like Arthur, she was a committed Stalinist who also happened to be in love with her egocentric and increasingly paranoid boss.
Poor old Geoff Kirk was simply sidelined by MacGregor, who brought in Rod Tyler, an old Fleet Street hand, to handle his personal PR.
Rod, a one-time boyfriend of Carol Thatcher and biographer of her mother, was well placed to bypass the NCB press department.
The big, unexpected star of the propaganda battle was Peter Walker, the silky smooth Energy Secretary who ran the Government line through the lobby, often without consulting the most famous curmudgeon of the time, Bernard Ingham, fuming not very quietly in Downing Street.
Ingham’s distrust of the Fleet Street irregulars, the boozy and often chaotic industrial correspondents, marked the beginning of the end for a group which had outgunned the lobby during the 1960s and 1970s.
Their death warrant was formally signed a year later after Murdoch won his own personal victory over the unions at Wapping. I left The Sun before that final death struggle, pointing out to MacKenzie that he could not pay me enough money to listen to any more of his personal bollockings.
Kelvin rightly pointed out that he got nightly bollockings from Rupert, so why shouldn’t he be allowed to bollock the galley slaves in the newsroom?
Like the defeated miners, I thought there should be personal dignity in the workplace. I might as well have been talking Chinese to the – for once gobsmacked – editor.
Tom Condon was industrial editor of The Sun during the miners’ strike and is a freelance journalist and media advisor to transport union TSSA.
John Street is away.
