Thatcher was wrong, we don’t all turn right
Getting older doesn’t necessarily mean being right-wing
SOME historians say the one thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.
And they have a point. Take the newly released papers about a 1987 briefing Margaret Thatcher had before an interview with pop magazine Smash Hits, as part of a Tory drive to win the youth vote. Proving that then, like now, they couldn’t understand why the young found them as appealing as a doctor’s referral to an STD clinic.
The briefing oozes delusion as Thatcher is told her earlier appearance on kids’ TV show Saturday Superstore “is still the subject of praise from youngsters” (I’m guessing Jacob Rees-Mogg’s nanny let him skip pheasant hunting class to watch it and he dictated a letter of approval to Tory Central Office).
She was told that the point of the interview was to show she’s “in touch with youngsters and understood their needs”. Which, after a decade of sentencing most school-leavers to dead-end schemes is a bit like the Judeans sending Herod to an infant mortuary so he could try to connect with beheaded babies.
In the Smash Hits piece, she attempts to portray herself as a groovy pop-picker by claiming in her youth to have listened to Adam Faith (so it’s his fault she spent the rest of her life singing What Do You Want If You Don’t Want Money?).
When asked for her reaction to “today’s left-wing pop acts like The Housemartins, The Style Council and Billy Bragg who can’t wait to get you out of Number 10?” she adopted her finest patronising grimace and replied: “Most young people rebel and then gradually they become more realistic. It’s very much part of life, really.”
In other words: “Thankfully sonny, the older you get the more right-wing you become, meaning these angry young men will soon be voting Tory. It’s how we stay in power.”
So was Thatcher correct back then? Did all those left-wing, 80s musicians turn into bread-heads like Jagger and Bono? Or, as with most of her certainties, did time
prove her wrong? Well, in July this year, Housemartin’s front-man Paul Heaton wrote to Business Secretary Greg Clark saying he was so concerned at the state of Tory Britain he wanted to nationalise all The Beautiful South’s royalties so they could be poured into our battered public services. Clark declined.
A few months before that, Paul Weller put together a supergroup for a gig in aid of the Corbyn-supporting Momentum because: “I think it’s time to take the power out of the hands of the elite and hand it back to the people of this country. I want to see a government that has some integrity and compassion.”
And later this month Billy Bragg will share a Devon stage with Jeremy Corbyn, drumming up Labour membership, while next month he brings out a CD of radical songs, called Bridges Not Walls.
So it turns out they defied Thatcher’s prediction and stayed rebels all their lives, probably because of the actions of her heirs.
Talking of bridges and walls, 44-yearold Eminem has just unleashed one of the most vicious attacks yet on Donald Trump in a rage-filled song, with lines such as “racism’s the only thing he’s Fantastic 4 cause that’s how he gets his rocks off”, telling his fans to make a choice between him and the president.
So maybe we do learn something from history. Thanks to 30-year-old papers about Thatcher we’ve learned that getting older doesn’t necessarily make you become more right-wing.
On the contrary, angry young men can turn into even angrier old men.
Thank God I’m not alone.