People often asked me about my story. They want to begin with the war, or with my dear wife Margaret. But I always begin with the bicycle.
Oh yes, that poor, maligned bicycle. The media, in its infinite stupidity, painted me as a monster for telling the unemployed to ‘get on their bike’ and look for work. They saw cruelty. I saw common sense. If the pit closes and there are no jobs for a hundred miles, you have two choices. Sit there and moulder, or find out what’s at the end of the road. My father, a fireman, taught me that. He didn’t have particular transferable skills. He had a job to do and a family to feed. So, yes. Get on your bike. Or walk. Or crawl. Just stop expecting the state to be your wet nurse.
That common sense was, I suppose, what brought me to the attention of Margaret Thatcher. You won’t find a bigger tribute from me, because nothing bigger exists. She looked at this country in the late seventies, this sick man of Europe, this graveyard of ambition, this strike-ridden, over-taxed, whinging mess, and she didn’t prescribe a soothing balm. She performed open-heart surgery with a rusty spoon. It was brutal. It was necessary. And it worked.
I was there, in the thick of it. Chairman of the Party. Secretary of State for Employment. I was the bad cop to her, well, to her slightly less bad cop. We battled the unions, we battled inflation, we battled the insidious, creeping rot of socialism that told people they had a right to something for nothing.
It was a glorious, exhausting, and profoundly worthwhile time. We didn’t do focus groups to see what people wanted to hear. We told them what they needed to know. There was a spine to the government then. You could have hung a coat on it. Now? You’d struggle to hang a teatowel.
And then, of course, came the bomb. Brighton, 1984. The Grand Hotel. People often speak of it with hushed tones, as if it were my heroic finale. It wasn’t. It was a bloody inconvenience. I’d just got to bed, and some Irish rabble decided to redecorate the room with shrapnel and broken glass. Margaret was trapped. I was trapped. Others were not so lucky. I remember the dust, the darkness, and a rather pressing need to get out.
They say my resilience was an inspiration. I saw it as a lack of alternatives. Lying there with a broken back, what was the other option? Weeping? Asking for a trauma counsellor to come and talk about my feelings? Nonsense. You grit your teeth, you bear the pain, and you get on with the job of living. It’s what this country used to do.
Now, a pigeon sneezes on a tube platform and they send in a team of therapists and issue a public helpline number. We are a nation of emotional hypochondriacs.
So what did i leave behind? A set of principles that, for a time, made a difference. It’s the belief that you should work for what you get, that you should be proud of your country, that you should obey the law, and that you should, for goodness sake, stop complaining but they’ve undone it all. Sold off the gold, flooded the country with more regulations than a Soviet commissar could dream of, and elevated 'feelings above facts. They tear down statues of people who built the Empire and put up wobbly metal modern art sculptures. They are, to put it mildly, a shower.
Which brings me, inevitably, to the end. How did I go? You’ll be expecting an epic struggle, a final defiant speech on the floor of the Commons. Not a bit of it. It was far more mundane, and therefore, far more irritating, natural causes.
So, there you have it. I have no regrets. I did what I thought was right. I served my country and a leader I believed in. The world went a different way but i'm not in it so that’s not my problem anymore.
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