Alongside the government’s immediate goal of including the arts budget in the drive to cut overall public spending was a more general philosophical attitude that held dependency on state
subsidy – in whatever field of activity – to be harmful. Indeed, the apostles of Thatcherism might have better defended themselves from the charges of cultural vandalism if they had
pointed out that the Arts Council’s first chairman, John Maynard Keynes, had envisaged that his new body should exist to ‘prime the pump of private spending’ in the arts, not to
replace it. Since he saw its work as funding capital outlays for new venues and guaranteeing loans, rather than providing long-term subsidies for running costs and performances, Keynes had even
imagined that the Arts Council’s role would diminish over time.
5
Despite the allegations that would be levied against them, none of
Thatcher’s arts ministers were ever Keynesian enough, judged by his own vision. Even after five years of Tory-imposed belt-tightening, the Arts Council was still able to subsidize the average
seat at the opera by £19, dance by £7.50 and theatre by £2.80.
6
Despite widespread suspicions in the creative sector, no plan to
abolish the Arts Council was seriously considered. Its budget, which had been £63 million when Thatcher came to power, reached £176 million by the time of her fall, which, even allowing
for inflation, represented a real-terms increase. In addition, local authorities boosted their arts budgets from £80 million in 1979 to £200 million in 1989, with local theatres being a
particular beneficiary.
However, an overall increase in funding over a ten-year time frame concealed significant real-terms cuts in the early eighties. It was in this period that the leaders of the arts developed a
virulent hostility towards Thatcher which had still not healed thirty years later. This antagonism was not just a consequence of the failure to fund specific projects; it was manifest in the charge
that Thatcherism encouraged materialism and commercialism, forces that were inimical to true – or at least challenging – art. Furthermore, the prime minister was depicted as the living
embodiment of this vulgarity – a provincial-minded woman, wedded to reductive housewife economics, who, like Oscar Wilde’s description of a cynic, knew the price of everything and the
value of nothing. This distaste was most evident in the response to her ministers’ call for the arts to look to alternative, private sources of funding and, in particular, to corporate
sponsorship. The policy was supported by Sir William Rees-Mogg, whom the government appointed chairman of the Arts Council in 1982 after fourteen years editing
The Times
, and especially by
the Arts Council’s new secretary general, Luke Rittner. Although selected through a process of open competition, the appointment
in 1983 of Rittner, who had been
running the Association for Business Sponsorship of the Arts (ABSA) for the past seven years, divided the Arts Council’s board and alarmed the wider cultural community, which assumed that
– as a 32-year-old with minimal school qualifications, taking over from the 65-year-old Sir Roy Shaw – all he would bring was knowledge of the tastes of businessmen rather than a real
appreciation of art for art’s sake. Rittner arrived at the Arts Council to find his staff welcoming him with a letter they had signed attesting that they would work for him because he was
their boss but not out of any respect for him.
7
In fact, unlike any of his predecessors, Rittner had actually worked in the arts, having trained as an actor and been both stage manager and administrative director of the Bath Festival. While
the recession of the early eighties was an inopportune moment to be going in search of additional funds, by 1983 the sums being successfully solicited reached £13 million, a vast improvement
on the position when Rittner’s fundraising efforts at ABSA had begun in 1976. In an effort to reassure those who feared that private fundraising would merely be self-defeating if it ensured
smaller state subsidies, in 1984 the government agreed to a business sponsorship incentive scheme whereby, for every £1 of corporate money raised, the state pledged to provide a further
£1. By the time Rittner stood down from the Arts Council in 1990, the corporate funds raised had topped £30 million.
8
The trend continued
thereafter. In its first decade, the business sponsorship incentive scheme raised £74 million for the arts.
9
For some commentators, corporate sponsorship was by its nature tainted. The prominent art critic Richard Cork worried that the consequence would be to stifle risk-taking, since major
corporations would want to be associated with the tried, tested and popular art of the great masters, rather than punting on more controversial, contemporary work.
10
Yet if the state was not prepared to underwrite every new exhibition or concert season, it was unclear where better alternatives lay. Norman St John Stevas had tried to get
the banks to fund a £500 million national endowment for the arts, but the plan had foundered, not least because one of the principles of corporate sponsorship was to link a company’s
support to a particular event rather than merely to donate indiscriminately. Instead, as the decade progressed, American Express, Mobil and even Carlsberg proved willing to part-finance major
exhibitions. The oil company Amoco supported Welsh National Opera. Tobacco companies were especially generous – and controversial – patrons: the eagle-eyed among the audience spotted
that the colour of the Philharmonia Orchestra’s music stands resembled that on the cigarette packets of their sponsor, Gallaher. To raised eyebrows from those who regarded art as the
antithesis of commerce, the V&A opened the Toshiba Gallery.
It was necessity more than open-mindedness that drove much of this push by arts administrators for private sector money. The national museums (which were government-funded
through the Museums and Galleries Commission) saw their total revenue fall in real terms by 3.2 per cent between 1979 and 1988, while state funding of their purchase grants fell by one third over
the period – an even more grievous cut given that soaring auction prices were making acquisitions more costly.
11
Faced with these reductions
in their core funding, other options had to be considered. The tradition (briefly interrupted in the early 1970s) of free entry to major museums and galleries was undermined in 1984 when the
National Maritime Museum in Greenwich began charging admission fees. The Natural History and Science Museums followed suit. In 1985, the V&A started suggesting a £2 ‘voluntary
donation’ from visitors – a move that was widely interpreted as preying on visitors’ sense of guilt at being seen as freeloaders, when the museum ought to have been welcoming in
those who, regardless of means, sought cultural enlightenment. Some who were unencumbered by guilt took to wandering through the building sporting the lapel badge ‘I Didn’t Pay at the
V&A’. To those offended by the intrusion of commercial imperatives, the museum added insult to injury by enlisting the Tory-patronized Saatchi & Saatchi to devise an advertising
campaign which went under the slogan ‘V&A: an ace caff with quite a nice museum attached’. Since the great national museums were already primarily taxpayer-funded, there was also
the question of the ethics of making taxpayers effectively pay twice for the privilege of seeing artefacts that had been bought by or gifted to the nation. The British Museum, National Gallery and
Tate Gallery held out against charging. The attendance statistics did much to bolster their stand, for between 1984 and 1988 the British Museum’s admission figures rose by around 20 per cent,
while the V&A’s fell by 31 per cent.
While the arts minister, Lord Gowrie, discussed with the V&A’s director, Sir Roy Strong, how to encourage a new age of philanthropy from ‘the “new” classes [to] pay
for art and not to regard it any more as part of the state handout’,
12
those producing the art worried more about the consequences should such
efforts succeed. Despite its critical successes, the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square was among the institutions facing a difficult future without finding new sources of revenue beyond its
ticket sales and state subsidy. Yet on its council Hanif Kureishi ‘voiced his concern at the acceptance of the need for commercial sponsorship and its recruitment of people who represented
the kind of society to which the [theatre] was opposed’. He was supported by his fellow board member and playwright, Caryl Churchill, who attacked the ‘impetus by the government towards
the privatization of theatre’, and ‘called for a concerted rejection of private sponsorship because of the intrinsic inequalities which the system promotes, and because of the
level of control which it gives to business organizations whose values are ultimately those of Thatcherism’.
13
Art had to be true to itself. Nevertheless, it seemed doubtful tactics for its champions to combine unrelenting and often extremely personal attacks on the prime minister with continual demands
that her government give them more money. While the
Guardian
’s seasoned theatre critic, Michael Billington, maintained that ‘through its mixture of moral bullying and punitive
cutbacks Thatcherism stifled intellectual debate’,
14
the near-universality of the arts establishment’s revulsion also made meaningful
dialogue with Thatcher’s supporters difficult, helping ensure that they would retreat into a caricature assumption that the arts lobby was irredeemably contemptuous of the very enterprise
culture that provided its subsidies. Here was a non-meeting of minds, eloquently displayed in the attitude of one of decade’s most successful theatre and opera directors, Dr Jonathan Miller.
To him, Thatcher was ‘loathsome, repulsive in almost every way’, with all her ‘odious suburban gentility and sentimental, saccharine patriotism, catering to the worst elements of
commuter idiocy . . . Why hate her? It’s the same as why the bulk of the human race is hostile to typhoid.’
15
In 1986, Harold Pinter and
his wife, the biographer Lady Antonia Fraser, along with John Mortimer and his wife, Penny, formed a group of dramatists and writers dedicated to discussing how they might hasten Thatcher’s
downfall. Calling themselves the 20th June Group, the obvious analogy was with the 20th July Plot of 1944 when Claus von Stauffenberg and the German resistance attempted to assassinate Hitler. In
the event, the Pinter putsch did not even manage to plant a metaphorical bomb beneath Thatcher’s Cabinet table, busying itself instead with dinner invitations to her regime’s celebrity
dissidents. As a dramatic conceit this might have worked well in one of Pinter’s plays. Undeterred, he assured the press: ‘We have a precise agenda and we’re going to meet again
and again until
they
break all the windows and drag us out.’ In fact, Pinter’s Georgian town house was never at risk of assault from the agents of the state. As another 20th June
Group habitué, David Hare, later conceded: ‘There was something preposterously enjoyable about the notion of Mr Mortimer’s portly frame, or Lady Antonia’s gracious person,
being squeezed through the windows of Campden Hill Square.’
16
The depiction of Thatcher as a philistine – perhaps in part because she was not interested in the avant garde – was harshly drawn. She admired the sculptor Henry Moore (even
attending his memorial service in 1986), read poetry, attended the opera out of choice rather than duty, and devoted time and money to building up her private collections of porcelain and ancient
Chinese scrolls. In 1988, she convinced the Cabinet of the need to spend in excess of £200 million acquiring for Britain the Thyssen art collection (which included major works by Holbein,
Caravaggio, Cézanne, Degas and
Van Gogh), only to be thwarted in the attempt by Spain. Despite their limitations, her cultural interests ran deeper than either the two
prime ministers (Wilson and Callaghan) who preceded her, or the two (Major and Blair) who followed her.
17
When she lunched with the Arts
Council’s national council (the first prime minister to do so), she demonstrated an impressive knowledge of issues and individuals.
18
Yet the
suspicion that she had never renounced the commercial outlook of the Midlands grocer’s shop clung to her, ensuring condescending derision from the arbiters of taste. It made little difference
that she had a few (mostly ageing) admirers in literary and artistic circles – in particular, Philip Larkin and the Angry Young Man (retired) Kingsley Amis. More importantly, not one of the
decade’s truly significant books, films or theatre dramas unambiguously saluted the principles of Thatcherism. Instead, as the playwright Howard Brenton saw it: ‘Thatcherism, like all
authoritarian dogmas, was brightly coloured. Writers were trying to get at the darkness, the social cruelty and suffering behind the numbingly neo-bright phrases – “the right to
choose”, “freedom under the law”, “rolling back the state”.’
19
This lack of comprehension in the output of the
country’s cultural leaders towards the thrice election-winning political leader was one of the most extraordinary disconnections of the era, for it meant that eleven years passed in which no
literary or dramatic art consciously celebrated the guiding spirit of the age.
On stage, screen and page, the prime minister became the embodiment of what was wrong – or had gone wrong – with Britain. As the film historian Leonard Quart has pointed out, this
was a level of personalized abuse generally absent on the other side of the Atlantic, because the social–political points American directors like Richard Pearce in
Country
(1984) and
Spike Lee in
Do the Right Thing
(1989) were trying to make were delivered without ‘barbed and contemptuous remarks aimed explicitly at Ronald Reagan’.
20
Yet in Mike Leigh’s
High Hopes
(1988), ‘Thatcher’ is the name Cyril, the kind-hearted socialist, gives to his cactus, in a film that
mercilessly parodies the blundering social aspirations of his sister and her used-car salesman husband, as well as the selfish behaviour of a snooty ‘yuppie’ couple who have bought and
renovated a former council house next to Cyril’s elderly mother. Though it was the supposed blasphemy towards Islam contained in
The Satanic Verses
(1988) that forced its author,
Salman Rushdie, to seek round-the-clock protection from her government, Thatcher was portrayed in the offending book as ‘Mrs Torture’. In
Paradise Postponed
(1985), John
Mortimer’s paean to the post-war dream, the loathsome despoiler and man-on-the-make is the Thatcherite Tory MP Leslie Titmuss. And while one of the decade’s most celebrated novels,
Money
(1984), by Martin Amis, was not explicitly an attack on the prime minister and her policies, its withering portrait of the corrupting influence of materialism and self-gratification
upon
John Self, a vulgar and crude maker of commercials, exposed the shallowness of the world the Tories were supposedly encouraging.