Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [393]
The project would have been very costly. We thought that it would require at least £200 million to satisfy the Baron’s requirements: but for this we would receive a collection valued at Sotheby’s at $1.2 billion. The cost would have had to be met by a combination of public and private funding to go towards the building in which the collection would be housed. It would have caused an outcry from some of the British arts lobby, who understandably thought that such sums would be better spent on them and their favoured projects. But it was worth it.
Nick Ridley and I took charge of the negotiations. Cabinet agreed the allocation of money. The international legal problems were all ironed out. Within a matter of six weeks the formal offer was taken personally by Robin Butler (the Cabinet Secretary) to Baron Thyssen in Switzerland. Alas, the real problem — insuperable as it turned out — was that it was not clear who precisely had the final say about the disposition of the collection. Nor was it clear what the status was of a loan agreement reached with the Spanish Government to the effect that the collection would go there for a period of years. In the end, it did indeed go to Spain on loan. But I had no regrets about having made the attempt to win it for Britain. It was not only a great treasure but a good investment — in every sense.
BROADCASTING
The world of the media had in common with that of the arts a highly developed sense of its own importance to the life of the nation. But whereas the arts lobby was constantly urging government to do more, the broadcasters were pressing us to do less. Broadcasting was one of a number of areas — the professions such as teaching, medicine and the law were others — in which special pleading by powerful interest groups was disguised as high-minded commitment to some greater good. So anyone who queried, as I did, whether a licence fee — with non-payment subject to criminal sanctions — was the best way to pay for the BBC, was likely to be pilloried as at best philistine and at worst undermining its ‘constitutional independence’. Criticism of the broadcasters’ decisions to show material which outraged the sense of public decency or played into the hands of terrorists and criminals was always likely to be met with accusations of censorship. Attempts to break the powerful duopoly which the BBC and ITV had achieved — which encouraged restrictive practices, increased costs and kept out talent — were decried as threatening the ‘quality of broadcasting’. Some of Britain’s television and radio was of very high quality indeed, particularly drama and news. Internationally, it was in a class of its own. But the idea that a small clique of broadcasting professionals always knew what was best and that they should be more or less immune from criticism or competition was not one I could accept. Unfortunately, in the Home Office the broadcasters often found a ready advocate. The irony that a Reithian rhetoric should be used to defend a moral neutrality between terrorism and the forces of law and order, as well as programmes that seemed to many to be scurrilous and offensive, was quite lost.
The notion of ‘public service broadcasting’ was the kernel of what the broadcasting oligopolists claimed to be defending. Unfortunately, when subject to closer inspection that kernel began rapidly to disintegrate. ‘Public service broadcasting’ was extremely difficult to define. One element was supposed to be that viewers or listeners in all parts of the country who paid the same licence fee should be able to receive all public service channels — what was described as the