www.gwales.com - 9781854114228, When Arthur Met Maggie

ISBN: 9781854114228 (1854114220)Publication Date June 2006
Publisher: Seren, BridgendFormat: Paperback, 215x137 mm, 200 pages Language: English Available Our Price: £9.99

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Gwales Description

In this enthralling and revealing new book, journalist and broadcaster Patrick Hannan examines the events leading up to and beyond the year of confrontation between the two leaders, Arthur Scargill and Margaret Thatcher, during the miners' strike of 1984-1985.

Yn y llyfr difyr a dadlennol hwn mae'r awdur a'r darlledwr Patrick Hannan yn archwilio'r digwyddiadau cyn ac ar ôl y flwyddyn o wrthdaro rhwng y ddau arweinydd, Arthur Scargill a Margaret Thatcher, adeg streic y glowyr ym 1984-1985.

Gwales Review

Patrick Hannan, writer, journalist and broadcaster, has informed, enlightened and infuriated us for several decades. He has been influential in fashioning political opinion in Wales and in interpreting the shadow plays enacted in Westminster and Cardiff Bay. His provocative and entertaining books The Welsh Illusion, Wales Off Message, and 2001: A Year In Wales are now followed by an idiosyncratic, speculative survey of late-twentieth-century British politics.

Hannan focuses on the titanic clash of the 1984-85 miners' strike, when Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and National Union of Mineworkers leader Arthur Scargill intransigently directed an economic and political 'war', fought a outrance, with 'at stake . . . the political future of the United Kingdom.' The course it took was due almost entirely to 'the implacable natures' of those two people.

From Labour's landslide electoral victory of 1945 onward, Hannan traces the antecedents of the miners' strike, deftly measures 'the elusive influences of character and chance' in the political process. What? Why? What if? Hannan excels in answering the cardinal question: Who? He reassesses the roles of Clement Attlee, Aneurin Bevan, Roy Jenkins, Edward Heath, Tony Benn and their colleagues and successors to the present day, highlighting success, failure, inspiration, stupidity. Journalistic flair and experience combine with irreverence and imagination. Agree or not with Hannan's conclusions, this retrospect demands thought on the part of the reader.

Virtually every page has its surprises, its new perspectives. Patrick Hannan knows every dyn pwysig, every woman of consequence. Among his valuable new sources of information are the diary kept by National Coal Board director Philip Weekes, and Dr Ursula Masson's biographical essay on Mrs. Rose Davies 1882-1958. The fortunes and tribulations of the National Assembly for Wales are reviewed critically, as are its personalities such as Rhodri Morgan, Dafydd Wigley, Dafydd Elis-Thomas. Hannan relishes internecine conflict, conspiracies, double-dealing and disputes!

He concludes: 'The curious, paradoxical thing about devolution is not that it's made Wales more distinct from the rest of the United Kingdom but that it's made it more the same. In an unexpected, unplanned way, it might turn out to have dished the nats after all.'

Of very special interest is Hannan's percipient chapter tracing the ever more significant role of women in Welsh life. Our National Assembly is the world's first legislature with parity of gender: thirty women, thirty men in 2003. In sad contrast stands the inveterate opposition within the New Labour Party to all-women election shortlists, as at Blaenau Gwent.

When Arthur Met Maggie is a highly individual, even 'gossipy' excursion into climactic events in our recent history, lucidly challenging myths and preconceptions with empathy and humour.

H. G. A. Hughes

It is possible to use this review for promotional purposes, but the following acknowledgement should be included: A review from www.gwales.com, with the permission of the Welsh Books Council.

Gellir defnyddio’r adolygiad hwn at bwrpas hybu, ond gofynnir i chi gynnwys y gydnabyddiaeth ganlynol: Adolygiad oddi ar www.gwales.com, trwy ganiatad Cyngor Llyfrau Cymru.

The following has been provided by the Publisher:

Author Biography:

Patrick Hannan’s long career in journalism and broadcasting has taken him from the traditional local newspaper chore of ringing the undertakers every morning, to covering many of the most significant industrial and political events in the last decades of the twentieth century.

As Industrial Editor of the Western Mail and later as the BBC’s Welsh Industrial and Political Correspondent, he reported widely on the turmoil of the nineteen seventies which was to change the nature of British politics. Later he worked as a producer of television documentaries, and as the writer and presenter of many programmes on Radio 4 including more than forty talks and two long-running series, Tea Junction and the political quiz, Out of Order. He is currently half the Welsh Team on BBC Radio 4’s Round Britain Quiz as well as being the presenter of two weekly series on Radio Wales.

He was educated at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, of which he is an honorary fellow. He is married and lives in Cardiff.

His other publications include: Wales on the Wireless (editor) Gomer 1988, Wales in Vision (editor) Gomer 1990, Land of My Father (introduction to photographs by David Hurn), The Welsh Illusion, Seren 1999 (2nd edition, Seren 2004), Wales, 2001: A Year in Wales, Seren 2002, Wales Off Message, Seren 2000.

Further Information:

In his enthralling and revealing new book When Arthur Met Maggie, journalist and broadcaster Patrick Hannan examines the events leading up to and beyond an historic year of confrontation in which two diametrically opposed figureheads, Arthur Scargill and Margaret Thatcher, met in a thunderous clash in a defining moment of British history: the miners’ strike of 1984-1985.
Taking heed from the strikes of ‘72 and ‘74 under Edward Heath’s leadership, Maggie’s policies were firm in resolve; Arthur Scargill for his part possessed an imperfect understanding of history, and a groundless optimism that some kind of workers’ uprising would drive a Conservative government from office. The combination of the two made for explosive results.
With horns locked, Arthur and Maggie, were united only by their contempt for the idea that compromise lay at the heart of political progress, they fought out Britain’s last great industrial battle with unswerving dedication to their respective causes – one attempting to insist on the authority of the past and the other to deny it. Both ready to battle to the death, what looked like the ultimate triumph of militant Conservatism in 1985 with the defeat of the NUM, actually also contained the seeds of the political party’s subsequent decline.
Hannan draws on the previously unpublished diaries of the late Philip Weekes, south Wales’ area director of the National Coal Board at the time, who was present at many of the most crucial meetings during the strike, and who maintained diaries which are indiscreet, critical and often highly amusing. He demystifies an event which could easily be viewed as the outcome of a confrontation between two people steadfastly convinced of the values of their political causes and, more dangerously, of their moral authority.
Hannan argues that small decisions made differently, accidents, delays and mistakes might have altered the course of events entirely. In a world in which what doesn’t happen can be as important as what does, he examines the elusive influences of character and chance against the steamroller of historical inevitability.

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