Showdown and climbdown

Of course, he never did. Margaret Thatcher had more sense than to enter into any kind of discussion with Arthur Scargill — the horror of the beer-and-sandwiches relations between previous governments and the unions was too great. Before the 1984-5 miners’ strike which dominated and defined Thatcher’s second term in office, just as the Falklands war dominated the first, she would not have wanted to be in the same room as Scargill. Afterwards, of course, so comprehensive was the government’s victory over Scargill’s intentions, the question would hardly have arisen. These days, as Patrick Hannan says, hardly one educated person in ten thousand could tell you the name of anyone connected with the National Union of Mineworkers.

Scargill was, without a doubt, a comic creation of considerable vivacity. Dickens himself could hardly have improved on him, even if some of his utterances at the time seemed more gruesome than amusing. Talking to the Sunday Times in 1982, he denied that he’d left the Communist party over Hungary:

Oh no. I supported the Soviet Union over Hungary. The Hungarian revolution was joined by known fascists … I also objected to the moving of Stalin’s body outside the mausoleum and changing the name of Stalingrad. It would be like trying to pretend Churchill never existed.

The comic appeal came with Scargill’s Citizen-Smith-like attempts to keep the greater struggle before the eyes of his more worldly and wavering troops. In 1972, he telephoned a Communist leader of the South Wales miners, trying to organise flying pickets at the Saltley coke works. According to the memory of Dai Francis’s son Hywel:

Arthur Scargill rang up the day before and said, ‘Look, Dai, we need pickets up at Saltley, in Birmingham.’ Dai said, ‘Where’s that?’ Arthur explained.