God and Mrs Thatcher (31 page)

Writers, directors and producers remained paranoid about the threat to artistic license but they need not have been. The fact was that there was less concern about the written word, i.e. those things that had dominated the ‘anti-filth’ campaigns of the 1960s and 1970s and greater emphasis on imagery. This was largely because of the increasingly explicit and edgy content in films and the invention of home video entertainment. In 1982 Whitehouse brought a private prosecution against
The Romans in Britain,
a play then being staged at the publicly funded National Theatre, which featured a simulated homosexual rape scene as a rather crude metaphor for colonialism. In the end, Whitehouse was forced to withdraw her case because the prosecution could not firmly establish whether the act was simulated or real; it was to be last time she would pursue her obscenity crusade through the courts. Those in the theatres, TV studios and publishing houses may have spoken of a new Puritan age, but the fact was that the Conservative climate proved as great a stimulant to artistic output as any substance in the 1960s. There was no serious threat or suppression of material and, if anything, the disapproval and consternation from figures such as Whitehouse only reinforced artists’ and writers’ sense of radical credentials against the right-wing tide.

A pledge to ban ‘video nasties’– those films of a violent and sexual nature – had been included in the Conservative manifesto in 1983 and was eventually translated into law in the Video Recordings Act the following year, with support from all parties. Mary Whitehouse could claim most of the credit for this; she had hosted showings of the damaging material at the Conservative Party conference and during the election had organised a caravan tour of the marginal constituencies to draw public attention to the issue. Whitehouse, however, was again disappointed. She had wanted full censorship rather than what Parliament had voted on, which was a classification system for home videos along the same lines as cinema films and regulated by the British Board of Film Classification. The Video Recordings Act was
a reaction to a perceived moral panic: not one person would be jailed for illegally providing such material, while prosecutions (in the form of fines) averaged just 2,000 cases over the next ten years. The Act was actually declared void by the EU as the European Commission had not been notified of its passing. In the end, it was not successful in preventing the availability of such material and the media continued to highlight the psychological damage and availability of such content, particularly in the wake of the Jamie Bulger murder case in 1993.

Whitehouse did not relinquish her battle with the nation’s public broadcaster, even when the emergence of a new commercial channel, the self-consciously subversive Channel 4, became a new target for her energies. In 1988, she could claim some success with her campaign for TV regulation when the government established the Broadcasting Standards Council. It was a questionable victory, however, given that the government’s licensing of satellite television two years later weakened the concept of regulation and, in the new era of multiple channels, the debate moved on from filth to one about quality and TV-overload for children.

In Whitehouse’s view, the Standards Council was too weak to be effective and she eventually came to the conclusion that the Thatcher government was a less than reliable ally in her moral crusade. Perhaps reluctant to alienate her supporters in and outside the House, Whitehouse refused to admit that the government’s promotion of individual liberty was completely at odds with her fight for increasing moral regulation.

Meanwhile, shrewd observers contrasted the laxity with which the government dealt with obscenity with the aggressiveness with which it pursued politically sensitive material, such as the tell-all MI5
Spycatcher
book by Peter Wright, which it unsuccessfully tried to ban in 1987, and, likewise, the ITV show
Death on the Rock
the following year, about the SAS shooting of IRA members in Gibraltar (which some say was the reason Thames Television later lost the London ITV franchise). When the government was willing (i.e. when its reputation was at stake), it was fully prepared to act as a forceful repressive machine.

It is one of the paradoxes of the Church in the 1980s – a fact that the moral lobby would frequently point out – that Anglican leaders seemed more comfortable and spoke with greater certainty on social and economic matters than they did about personal morality. In a letter to a parishioner explaining why he had not publicly supported the Festival of Light’s campaign against pornography, David Sheppard offered a somewhat cagey defence:

Sheppard put the onus on the laity, who in his view were ‘heard much more clearly than church leaders’. On the one hand Sheppard was right. From the 1960s denunciations of individual sin had tended to fall on deaf ears, whereas a recognition of social sins were much more likely to ingratiate the Church to the general public. For Whitehouse, however, it amounted to a wilful abdication of responsibility and a failure to uphold the moral standards of the Gospel. In 1987 she wrote to Sheppard reprimanding him for not condemning moral depravity with the same earnestness with which he spoke out against social deprivation. Sheppard’s response to Whitehouse was again less than convincing: ‘I have tried always to speak only about subjects that I can find time to be properly briefed about and which I can sustain.’
14
Sheppard was not alone in this; many of his fellow bishops took the same view. The Church did not talk about sex not out of a considered theological position or because they had not, in Sheppard’s words, been ‘properly briefed’, but because it was thought to generate bad PR and likely to
be ignored. In short, Whitehouse was right, the shift of emphasis from individual to social sin was a consequence of the Church’s attempt to adapt itself to the modern age. In a lengthy rebuke, Whitehouse insisted that individual and social sins were in fact intertwined:

Whitehouse may have criticised Sheppard for being selective and political in his advocacy, but it was a charge she was equally guilty of. She, like Thatcher, happily tarnished the left with the ‘permissiveness’ tag and targeted publicly funded institutions, such as the BBC, local government and the National Theatre. The moral lobby fuelled the right-wing notion that collectivism, liberalism and moral breakdown were inextricably linked, while they were noticeably silent on the pernicious forces of consumerism, the free market and a culture of individualism, which arguably were as much to blame. Whitehouse always maintained that lewd imagery gave rise to sex crimes and yet the NVLA and other Christian moralists demonstrated little solidarity with Labour MP Clare Short’s parliamentary bill to ban
The Sun’
s ‘Page Three Girl’, which touched on remarkably similar ground. And when
The Sun
launched its ‘Save our
Sizzlers
’ [SOS] campaign, it was Conservative MP and Synod member Peter Bruinvels, a man who liked to berate the Church for its moral laxity, who offered his wholehearted support to its Page Three ‘beauties’, who he said were ‘pure harmless fun’ that ‘brightens up every man’s day’.
16
Unsurprisingly, Claire Short’s campaign did not win over many converts on the right, chiefly because she linked her cause not to declining morals but to
the culture of patriarchy and sexual violence against women. She was dismissed as either a censorious spoilsport or a militant feminist, and indeed faced as much vitriol from the right as Whitehouse faced from the liberal left. An alliance between feminists and moralists was never likely, especially as the former tended to view organisations such as the NVLA as reinforcing the very structures and values that oppressed women. In the 1980s, however, a much more dangerous phenomenon emerged, one that would eventually break all the taboos surrounding the public discussion of sex.

In 1985, the chaplain of Chelmsford prison, Rev. Gregory Richards, was found to be one of the first victims to die of AIDS. The prison was put in full quarantine; no one was let in and definitely no one was let out. An autopsy was not carried out on Gregory Richards’s body as it was deemed too risky. The media, however, conducted a full post-mortem into the priest’s double life as a homosexual and hunted down his former lovers: ‘If any of them have the disease there is nothing anyone can do to save them,’ said a spokesperson for the jail. When Richards’s death was announced, the local radio station was flooded with calls from concerned worshippers who had taken wine from the priest’s chalice. Holy Communion did not necessarily bring eternal life, but apparently potential death.

It is easy to forget the panic that greeted the discovery of the HIV/AIDS virus in the early 1980s. The few known facts quickly became clouded in a murky stigmatisation of the disease as the ‘gay plague’ or the ‘permissive pandemic’. It was later classified as a retrovirus contracted through blood, meaning that haemophiliacs and heterosexuals were as much at risk as heroin addicts and homosexuals. Three decades on it is clear that those most vulnerable are not ‘deviants’ at all, but, as with all diseases throughout history, those without proper access to sanitation, healthcare and education. In the early ’80s, though, it was commonplace for people such as Alfred Sherman to dismiss HIV sufferers as ‘undesirable minorities … mainly sodomites and drug-abusers,
[and] women who voluntarily associate with this sexual underworld’, or for the Chief Constable of the Manchester Police, James Anderton, known as ‘God’s Copper’, to dismiss HIV sufferers as ‘swirling in a cesspool of their own making’.
17
Anderton’s comments were widely condemned but he was not forced to retract them. Margaret Thatcher, an admirer of Anderton, did everything she could to keep him in his job and later awarded him a knighthood just before she left Downing Street.

The AIDS crisis was never that far from the Conservative Party. Nicholas Eden MP (son of former Prime Minister Anthony Eden), who had served as a minister under Thatcher, was one of the earliest public figures to die from the disease, although at the time it was reported that he had suffered from pneumonia. The government, however, was slow to respond to the AIDS crisis and was only forced out of its inertia by worrying predictions on the extent of the problem. One report that arrived on the Health Secretary’s desk came from the British High Commissioner in Zambia, who estimated that one in five in that country had contracted the disease. AIDS was no longer a minor concern; everyone was at risk.

AIDS was one issue that Margaret Thatcher was happy to delegate. She rarely mentioned the topic in interviews and appeared distinctly uncomfortable when forced to answer questions on it. She did however take the unprecedented step of setting up a special committee to be spearheaded by Health Secretary Norman Fowler and Leader of the House of Lords Viscount Whitelaw, who Fowler later said approached the matter ‘like he was running a VD campaign in the army’.
18
In another unprecedented move, the government tabled a full day’s debate in Parliament in November 1986 and prepared a public awareness campaign, which would be ground-breaking in its scale and content. However, the government was conscious that it was on sensitive ground. Long protracted meetings with medical professionals and civil servants were held in Whitehall over the appropriate semantics
for various sexual positions. Norman Fowler was bemused that oral sex would need to be referenced: ‘Do we know how many people
do
this sort of thing?’ he reportedly enquired.
19
When the campaign was finally launched, it proved too much for Lord Chancellor Lord Hailsham, who conveyed his disapproval in a letter to Whitelaw: ‘I am convinced that there must be some limit to vulgarity! Could they not use literate “sexual intercourse”? If that is thought to be too narrow, then why not “sexual relations” or “physical practices”, but not “sex” or, worse, “having sex”!’
20
Nor was Margaret Thatcher overly enthused when she saw the campaign posters, and suggested that they be placed in public lavatories rather than as full-page spreads in newspapers. Thatcher was not being unnecessarily prudish, but reflecting an apprehension that many shared: could Britons stomach all this open talk about sex?

The mastermind behind the campaign was advertising guru Sammy Harari, who clearly had a better instinct for what the British could tolerate: chastity would be hard to sell, but fear would not. Everyone over thirty can still remember actor John Hurt’s chilling warning to us all not to ‘die of ignorance’ against a volcanic scene as the word AIDS is chiselled into a headstone and lilies slumped on a tomb. The government’s campaign was not exclusively directed at the homosexual community but also at women and married couples, as well as travelling businessmen seeking pleasures after office hours. Advertisements were matched with a leaflet through every post-box, a week-long series of TV programmes and, in a bold move, the opening of needle exchanges (one of the reasons why the figures on heroin abuse rose so dramatically in the 1980s). The government also dished out a threefold rise in monies for the hospice charity, the Terence Higgins Trust. The employment of Sammy Harari was a triumphant example of government outsourcing and a rare demonstration of the advertising world contributing to the public good.