If you want to thank anyone for the Thatcher government, you can thank Charles and Maurice Saatchi.
The Iraqi-born brothers were responsible for creating the most successful advertising agency of the eighties – Saatchi and Saatchi – and came up with the famous slogan “Labour isn’t Working” for the Conservatives’ 1978 election campaign. Posters such as the iconic one featuring long queues of the ‘unemployed’ (actually a bunch of Young Conservatives roped in to help) helped oust Jim Callaghan’s Labour government and were used throughout the reign of the Tories to sugar-coat the privatisation of state-owned interests such as British Airways.
Fast forward 19 years, however, and his depiction of Tony Blair with demonic eyes failed to scare people off voting for Labour.
Forming their alliance in 1970, Charles’ penchant for shock tactics and Maurice’s analytical skills (honed at the London School of Economics) brought us radical ads such as the ‘pregnant man’, designed to promote contraceptives. ‘Would you be more careful if it was you that got pregnant?’ asked the advert reproachfully.
Such psychological bullets made Saatchi and Saatchi the biggest ad agency in the world by 1986. In 1990 the brothers left the company after a boardroom coup and set up rival ad agency, M&C Saatchi.
As Maurice’s political interests drew him up the ranks of the Conservative party and Charles’ new passion for collecting art intensified, the pair grew apart. Charles staged impressive shows at his Saatchi Gallery and sucked in punters with his relentless hyping of the most brazen of the Young British Artists, including Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin. Paying fortunes for their work, he was criticised for ‘playing God’ and creating an annoyingly exclusive art-scene.
A self-confessed ‘gorger of the briefly new’ Charles also snapped up the TV cook Nigella Lawson, months after she was widowed, marrying her in September 2003. His gallery moved to County Hall that year but after a wrangle over the lease he is now looking to relocate to Chelsea in 2007.
Maurice was made a Lord in 1996 and went on to become shadow Treasury spokesman and latterly co-Chairman of the Conservative Party.