The Thatcher governments and the British Sports Council, 1979–1990

The month of February 2015 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the foundation of the Sports Council. Despite its central role in sports governance in Britain, the advisory Council of 1965 and its successor bodies have received little attention from historians. This article assesses the early history of the Sports Council, using primary material such as National Archive papers and memoirs by practitioners to focus attention particularly on the period of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership in the 1980s. The pre-1979 Council commanded widespread respect, and the article explores how and why it became beleaguered thereafter, attributing this to a combination of ideological distrust as ‘Thatcherism’ gained in strength, shortcomings on the part of the Council itself and parochial in-fighting among leading sports bodies. By the mid-1980s the Council was under scrutiny as never before, some in the political and sporting world questioning whether it had a viable future. Although it survived to fight another day, the confidence and momentum of earlier years became a thing of the past and the way was opened up for a major overhaul of sports administration to be carried out in the 1990s.