Thoroughly modern carve up

“People ask me,” said writer Jonathan Coe last night at a Guardian event looking back on his masterpiece, “why don’t you write another What a Carve Up!? It’s all still so relevant. But that’s exactly why I’m not going to write another one.”

What a Carve Up! did to the 1980s in literature what Wall Street did in film. Constructed around the fictional Winshaw family, who between them represented all that was corrupting modern Britain, it was a novel that summed up the decade. Coe recalled how, when he was writing it in the early 1990s, he went to the British Library and drew up a “menu”—a kind of shopping list of iniquity—for the areas he want to satirise: “Politics, culture, finance, arms dealing, media, and food production.”

This list culminated in a cast of characters that seem as relevant today as when they were written, and, in some cases, more so. Coe joked that Mark Winshaw, who surreptitiously sells weapons to Saddam Hussein, was the character that perhaps brought him closest to libel. At least in the novel Mark's arms trading had to be kept secret. Now he probably would have been part of the delegation of arms dealers that accompanied David Cameron to the Middle East in February as Egypt erupted.

Thomas Winshaw represents perhaps the best-remembered feature of the 1980s: the explosion in the banking industry. His profession seemed offensive when the book was written, but today’s vast bills for government bailouts have added financial complaint to moral outrage. Coe said that when he had aspects of Thomas read back to him, he was struck by the character’s pertinence. Meanwhile Henry Winshaw, the ignorant and aggressive politician who is shown the profitable potential of a privatised NHS by his uncle, would surely approve of health services being handed out to "any willing provider."

This lasting relevance was in part intentional. Coe described the book’s conclusion (spoiler alert) as a “political parable about the indestructibility of Winshawism, or Thatcherism.” The distinction is an interesting one. Recent historical work on Thatcher, notably Richard Vinen’s Thatcher’s Britain, emphasises that the Iron Lady was of her time, and rejects the continual use of her as a catch-all description of a certain kind of politics or society. Yet Winshawism, encapsulating the greedy, oligarchic impulses of the 1980s, endures.

I asked Coe whether this foresight meant that he was not surprised by the persistence of Winshawism today. “Not surprised, really; I’m disappointed,” he replied. He becomes “quite nostalgic” about the political circumstances in which he wrote the book—not because of where the Tory party was, but because of where the Labour party was. When Neil Kinnock, and later John Smith were at its head, “an alternative to Thatcherism was regularly being articulated by leading politicians.” This, he feels, is no longer the case.

Which perhaps helps us to appreciate why the book’s politician was a reconstituted Labour man, based, as Coe let slip last night, on Woodrow Wyatt. Originally MP for Birmingham Aston (near to where Coe grew up), Wyatt gradually journeyed across the political spectrum, from Labour backbencher to journalist for the News of the World, where his "Voice of Reason" column cheered Thatcher on and infuriated the left.

It would be reductive to say that the only reason to revisit the book now is because its characters and their misdemeanours are so achingly familiar. More than anything, it is an extremely funny book and one that uses, in Coe’s words, “narrative curiosity as a courtesy to the reader.” But if you do choose to take a look at it today, you might be shocked by what hasn’t changed in the best part of 20 years.