Thatcher, Farage and toe-sucking: Adam Curtis on how Britain came to the brink of civil war

The Guardian

a day ago

The mood is very fragile. There is a feeling of global disorder and growing chaos. The threat of war edges ever closer. Some people are even predicting revolution in the UK. Two weeks ago, Dominic Cummings gave an interview to Sky News prophesying violent uprising, then wrote on his blog that there is 'Whitehall terror of widespread white-English mobs turning political … Parts of the system increasingly fear this could spin out of control into their worst nightmare.'
I think something much deeper is going on beneath the surface of Britain today. Two years ago, a historian called Christopher Clark wrote a book that makes you look at your own time in a completely different way. Called Revolutionary Spring, it tells the story of the unrest that swept Europe in 1848. In a few weeks, uprisings spread like ferocious brushfire – from Paris to Berlin to Vienna, Prague and Milan. Thousands of demonstrators stormed national assemblies and kings fled their countries, caught up in a wave of violent upheaval never seen before. Clark's book inspired me to make Shifty, my new series of films, because the world he describes feels so similar to today. One in which 'the political horizon was dark. Neither nations nor governments knew where they were going.
'Everyone had surrendered to doubt and anxiety. All forms of belief were enfeebled, all forms of authority shaken, social bonds had reached breaking point. The political horizon was dark. Neither nations nor governments knew where they were going. There was a sense of being 'on the eve of bloody wars and internal strife'.'
All the revolutions failed in their original aim. But out of them came the bourgeois class that was going to run society in the future. Fascinatingly, Clark showed how from that came all the ways of ordering the world that we today accept as eternal – not just the political structures of left and right but fundamental ideas of our time, like social class. But he is clear that they may be temporary. 'They belonged to the world that had not yet encountered the great disciplining identities of modern politics. We belong to one in which those identities are swiftly dissolving.'
I wanted to make a series set in Britain over the past 45 years that shows how all our political certainties dissolved. It is built of hundreds of moments that try to evoke what it has felt like to live through this age. The mood is that strange twilight zone between history and memory; fragments that have not yet been fixed into a formal version of the past. From intersex dogs and fat-shaming ventriloquists to avant-garde hair. Leeks by moonlight. Ken Dodd's suitcase. Nuns playing ping pong. Margaret Thatcher's handbag. A scanner from Maplin. Netto. And dark moments – racist attacks, suspicion of others and modern paranoia about conspiracies in Britain's past.
Above all, I wanted to trace the rise of the thing that has destroyed the confidence of our age: distrust – not just of those in power, and of 'truth', but of everything and everyone around us and, ultimately, of ourselves.
It didn't start like that. Thatcher believed that if you liberated people from state control they would become better and more confident. But to do this, she turned to radical rightwing economic thinkers – some of whom were very odd. About 15 years ago, I went to see a US economist called James Buchanan. I had to drive for hours deep into the mountains of Virginia to his farm. He told me that you couldn't trust anyone in any position of power. Everyone, he insisted, is driven by self-interest.
We sat in a darkened room, with a thunderstorm raging outside, as he told me firmly that human beings didn't just follow their own self-interest when they were buying and selling stuff; they were driven by it all the time. So when people in power talked of being motivated by 'public duty', they were lying.
He called this 'public choice theory', and it had an enormous effect on the advisers around Thatcher. It explained to them why all the bureaucrats that ran Britain were so useless. The economists invented a system called New Public Management (NPM) to control them. NPM said it was dangerous to leave people to motivate themselves through fuzzy notions such as 'doing good'. Instead, you created systems that monitored everyone through targets and incentives. Constantly watching and rewarding or punishing. It was the birth of modern HR. Anyone who has ever dealt with HR and their monitoring systems knows instinctively that they don't trust you. There is a very good moment that was captured on a documentary about London Zoo in 1993 made by Molly Dineen. The zoo had brought in a new HR expert who explains to the mild-mannered zookeepers how incentives and targets work. 'Once you do that,' he says, 'you've got them in the Grinder.'
That's Buchanan's theories at work. And it was a terrible virus that was going to spread.
But the roots of distrust didn't just come from the right. The patrician liberals in Britain were completely shocked that large sections of the working class voted for Thatcher. They had always drawn their influence and prestige from the idea that they cared for the 'little people' and the 'less well-off'. Now they turned on them in fury. I found a clip of the novelist Martin Amis promoting his book Money. Dripping with disdain, he says the working class have been seduced by the vulgar allure of money. They are, he said, stupid.
It was at that moment the influence of liberal intellectuals began to slip. Power was shifting.
There was one institution Thatcher still trusted, though: the security services. Even that crumbled with the case of Geoffrey Prime who worked at GCHQ. It started when Prime's wife came home to find him being questioned about the assault of a local girl. After the police left, he told her that he was the man they were looking for. She asked him if there was anything else she should know. He said yes: he'd also been spying for the Russians for the past 17 years.
Thatcher was stunned. MI5 had vetted Prime five times and hadn't noticed anything. Even the Russians knew he was a paedophile. It became clear MI5 was hopeless. And when it failed to prevent the siege of the Libyan embassy in 1984, she ordered the home secretary, Leon Brittan, to reform it. MI5 fought back – spreading rumours through journalists that Brittan was a predatory paedophile, part of a secret ring of paedophile MPs in Westminster. Thirty years later, those rumours would burst to the surface as part of Operation Midland. None of it was true.
By the end of the 80s the belief that you couldn't trust anyone in public life, which Buchanan started, finally came round to the politicians themselves. It was basic logic. If you believed public duty was a fiction, and all public servants were lying when they spoke of public duty, weren't the politicians also public servants? Which meant they must also be lying when they proclaimed they were working for the public good.
One of the key figures in this process was the infamous publicist Max Clifford. He had picked up on the groundswell of distrust and found a way to monetise it. Clifford specialised in putting two or three of his clients together and cooking up stories from which they all benefited.
He started in the late 80s with a famous radical leftwinger called Derek Hatton. He took him to a nightclub – which Clifford also represented. He photographed Hatton next to an heiress of the Baring bank family – whom he also represented – and cooked up a passionate romance between them. Then he turned to the Tories. When a government minister called David Mellor was revealed to be having an affair, his mistress – Antonia de Sancha – came to Clifford. He took her to meet the press in restaurants he represented, then told them stories about Mellor making love in a Chelsea shirt while toe-sucking and spanking. All invented.
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Clifford had opened the floodgates. In the early 90s, MP after MP was revealed to be a sleazy hypocrite who seemed far more concerned with his own weird sex life than governing the country and serving the people. The one I love is the story of David Ashby MP. He sued the Sunday Times in 1995 when they accused him of being a homosexual. He admitted he had shared a bed with another man, but said it was purely to save money on holiday. He admitted that his wife did call him 'Queenie' and 'Poofter', but said that was only because she was lonely in the marriage. He had bought her a dog to make her feel better. But it didn't work. Ashby told the court she threw plates and kitchen knives at him. She threatened to 'kick him in the bollocks to stop him having sex with anyone', and broke his glasses. Ashby lost the case, which put paid to his career. Soon, he was deselected by his local Tories as their parliamentary candidate. He later said of his ex-colleagues, on live radio: 'They're a bunch of shits, aren't they, and we know they are.'
The early 90s saw an extraordinary collapse in trust in politicians. Created not just by Clifford, but also by Mohamed Al-Fayed, who said that he regularly paid MPs with cash in brown paper envelopes to ask questions for him in the Commons. It seemed to prove everything Buchanan had been saying: you couldn't trust anyone in public service.
After I interviewed Buchanan in the Virginia mountains, I asked him about his life. He told me about how when he was training as an officer in the US Navy, he was constantly patronised by pompous officers from posh Ivy League universities. He was still angry about it – he knew they were all phoneys, he said, you could feel it. As I drove back I wondered if that was his real motivation. Dressed up in academic language, but beneath it was simply revenge. He was going to destroy that smug patrician class. And he succeeded. Big time.
By the second half of the 90s, even the politicians came to believe they were bad. And they did the most extraordinary thing: they gave away power. They did it partly because they knew they couldn't fight against the rising tide of public doubt. But they were also persuaded by another force they felt they could no longer fight against: the markets. The first to go was Bill Clinton. His secretary of the treasury, Robert Rubin, persuaded him to pull back from public spending. Instead, he should cut the deficit and allow the markets to create a financial boom. Clinton agreed – and the US boomed throughout the 90s. But it also led directly to the global crash of 2008. ƒ
And behind the markets was a whole academic industry that had taken Buchanan's ideas and run with them. They wrote articles that bluntly said the role of politicians in society should be marginalised because so much of what they did was 'sub-optimal'. Journalists picked up these ideas and put them in simpler terms. Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International wrote: 'What we need in politics today is not more democracy – but less'.
In the face of this undermining of politics, New Labour also gave in. The day after their victory in 1997, the new chancellor, Gordon Brown, dramatically announced that he was giving power over the setting of interest rates to the Bank of England. It was an extraordinary move. Labour MPs were aghast. One, Bryan Gould, exclaimed: 'What then is the role of the chancellor? Or more simply, what is the role of democracy?'
Brown later admitted the truth: that it was because politicians were now seen as dangerous. We did it, he said, 'not for any fundamental economic reasons', but because we weren't trusted. Born out of a weird self-hate, that single act was largely responsible for the present powerlessness of politicians. It was also helped on by a new phenomenon – because liberal culture too caught the disease. The Thick of It was a comedy series based around a government minister and their advisers. They live in a constant state of self-interested hysteria. Reacting to events and having no control over the real world outside. It was seen as liberal satire – but it can also be seen as a very powerful expression of Buchanan's idea that all politicians are completely venal, driven only by dark emotions.
But that wasn't the end of it. Because a new kind of politician rose up, bred in the swamp of distrust. They saw that playing bad in an over-the-top way would give you a great deal of power. Because in a world of disenchantment, where no one believed that politicians could be good, being bad meant you must be authentic. I give you Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage and Donald Trump: pantomime villains who are locked together with us in a feedback loop of shock-outrage-badness repeating endlessly.
Outside this theatre, really bad people do really bad things – but we are distracted by the pantomime. Meanwhile, the classes that once made up society fractured. The liberals turned on those who voted for Brexit, using with one voice the word Amis had spat out 30 years before: 'stupid'.
It may be that Britain – and much of Europe – is in a similar moment to that described by Clark just before 1848: on the edge of a new kind of society we don't yet have the language to describe. It feels frightening because without that language it is impossible to have coherent dreams of the future. To build a better world, you need an idea of what should change and how.
And one of the things preventing that may be our obsession with constantly replaying the past. In the present age, the fog of experience has been thickened by the mass of recorded data that allows the recent past to be endlessly replayed, refusing to fade away. A constant loop of nostalgia – music, images, films and dreams from the past. It is another block to the future. And it is also the way this series is made. My bad.
Shifty in on BBC iPlayer from Saturday 14 June.