In the autumn of 1984, solicitors were allowed to advertise for the first time, but if the public failed to spot their modest announcements it was probably because the newspapers were awash with a much more unusual publicity blitz. The government was selling half of British Telecommunications, as the phone company was then called, and it needed the help of people who had never previously owned a share. The BT flotation was the start of a phenomenon that was as much a part of the decade that followed as Bros, the Pet Shop Boys or Wham! Buoyed by a bull market, the government used the BT model to sell £80 billion of nationalised industries, balancing the government books and creating a new generation of equity holders.
BT was not the first privatisation. That honour went to British Aerospace in February 1981, but the sums were small — just £150 million compared with the £3.9 billion the initial BT sale would realise. Cable & Wireless followed, with Britoil and the X-ray technology firm Amersham the following year. But these were sales aimed at City institutions rather than the general public and their newspaper advertisements were grey tombstones of small print, not the racy display ads designed to attract buyers for BT.
Some of the early privatisations, such as National Freight Corporation and Sealink, were not aimed at the stock market at all; instead they were conducted as trade sales or buy-outs, such was the perceived lack of investor interest. Indeed, if political interest was low too — privatisation did not even feature in Margaret Thatcher’s 1979 manifesto — it was matched by doubts in the City as to the appetite for so much equity.
But by mid-1984, when Associated British Ports, Enterprise Oil and Jaguar had been floated off too, ministers realised the goldmine of state assets they were sitting on even if the Square Mile was unconvinced that an issue as large as BT was possible.
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