Thatcherism: Nothing To Do With Family Values

Suzanne Moore writes:

We must not speak ill of the dead, so instead let me speak ill of the living.

The facts of the life of Cecil Parkinson, who died last week, are this: a blue-eyed Tory grandee, he was one of Margaret Thatcher’s favourites.

He was credited with organising the campaign that won them the 1983 election. He became trade and industry secretary, though it is said his star was on the rise and Thatcher wanted to promote him to foreign secretary.

He was smooth on TV, if you like that sort of thing, and clearly many did. He calmly explained what the government was doing: for example, going to war over some islands that most people had never heard of – the Falklands.

His amiability bewitched many. In 1984, Charles Moore wrote in the Spectator: “He brought a certain dash and glamour to the show, which it now badly lacks.”

The dash had been interrupted the year before, when his secret 12-year affair with his secretary became public knowledge. She was pregnant with his child. He had once promised to marry her, but changed his mind.

Sara Keays decided to keep the baby. Financial arrangements were made for the child, Flora. But by 1987, because of Flora’s multiple disabilities, Keays wanted more child maintenance.

At the age of four, Flora, who had epilepsy, underwent brain surgery for a tumour. There was more to-ing and fro-ing in court.

By 1992, Parkinson had been elevated to the House of Lords. He then also secured an extraordinary court injunction that meant Flora could not be discussed in public.

Her name could not even appear in the programme of her school play. She never received a birthday card from her extremely wealthy father and he never saw her.

When the injunction ceased on her 18th birthday in 2002, Flora said publicly: “I would like to see him. If he loved me he would want to see me and be in my everyday life …” 

Keays, who had political ambitions of her own, was subject to a campaign to discredit her: she had got pregnant deliberately to “trick” her lover of 12 years. 

Parkinson was re-elected in 1987, and went on to prepare the ground for privatisation of the electricity industry. So his private life didn’t wreck his political career. Clearly, adultery is common, but only matters if you are as common as muck.

Does a politician’s private life matter? All I can say is that as I became a single parent at around the same time, the interplay between Tory rhetoric and Tory reality hit home. I felt under attack. Was it just my imagination? 

Thatcherism is, I think, still often misread as being about a set of fixed family values. Actually, it was pretty amoral. It was entirely about privatisation. You could do what you like if you could pay for it, as Parkinson did.

Thatcher said that the existence of single mothers “devalues our values”. Stories of girls who got pregnant to secure social housing became the prevalent narrative.

The nightmare of communities where men don’t stick around is still around. Some of us have even lived quite happily in such communities.

But the legacy of all this is now a systematic attack on women and children, no longer on the spurious ground of “values” but because of “austerity”. 

Not all single parents are women, I know; 9% are men. A quarter of families with dependent children are headed by single parents, 64% of us are in work, and the vast majority do not receive any child maintenance payments. The risk of children going into relative poverty doubles for single-parent families. 

Iain Duncan Smith may lack Parkinson’s charm, but he is passionate about promoting marriage, which is apparently to be achieved by punishing women already abandoned by men. 

He blames the 60s, when women freed themselves from marriage and were taught that having children was just “another lifestyle choice”. It’s just like buying a new nail varnish, isn’t it? 

Where are the men in this conversation? Someone has to impregnate all us feckless females. But in the end, what the government cares about is the actual children, isn’t it? Just not the actual children of single parents. 

Even this government’s own impact assessment says that benefit caps will hit single mothers hardest. Herein lies the link between the personal and political.

Parkinson’s colleagues were clearly forgiving of his behaviour. He carried on as if nothing had happened. 

Together, they formulated policy that would make it unacceptable not to do what he had done, but to be a woman with a child and without a man.

The ultimate privatisation is one where the rich are not subject to the same judgments as the poor. Pay as you go.

The attack on single parents in the 80s was not my imagination. The attack now gathers pace in the name of balancing the books. Hard-working women must pay the price. 

I know what it’s like not to have someone there to share the highs as well as the lows. That’s why we make our own families of friends, and we value what we have.

One thing we don’t do is deny the existence of our own children. That would be immoral. Or require a certain dash.