Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality (56 page)

‘We really are a true peace movement ourselves’, she riposted at a London press conference with Chancellor Helmut Kohl of Germany, in February 1983. ‘We are the true disarmers, in that we stand for all-sided disarmament, but on a basis of balance.’
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Her annexation of her opponents’ labels showed that she had learned a trick from an earlier Tory leader, Benjamin Disraeli, when he famously taunted: ‘We have caught the Whigs bathing and run away with their clothes.’
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The nakedness of the opposition was painfully exposed on defence. Margaret Thatcher exploited it by promoting Michael Heseltine to Defence Secretary in January 1983. She was mistrustful of him, but she recognised his talent for public relations. He used it ruthlessly in caricaturing both the well-meaning leftism of the peace campaigners and the muddled unilateralism of official opposition. By the time the coming election began to loom in the national consciousness, the gulf between Labour and Conservative policy on national security had never looked wider. Overshadowing the day-to-day argument on defence, Margaret Thatcher held the trump card of her military resolution in the Falklands. She barely needed to play it.

For different reasons, the Alliance of the Liberal and Social Democratic Parties were faring little better than Labour against Margaret Thatcher in the popularity stakes. The SDP leader, Roy Jenkins, was well past his prime when he was returned to Parliament in a by-election. His interventions in the House of Commons seemed as dated as his plummy voice and pompous mannerisms. David Owen was a more incisive, but also a more divisive, figure within the Alliance. Margaret Thatcher respected him, and had been grateful for his support in debates during Falklands War. But his internal squabbles with the Liberal leader, David Steel, soon gave the Alliance the appearance of a marriage of inconvenience. It looked too fractious to be relevant to the long-term governance of Britain.

By the spring of 1983 Margaret Thatcher should have known that she could win a general election whenever she decided to call one. Yet she was curiously hesitant to make this move. Conservative Central Office, under the chairmanship of Cecil Parkinson, was gung-ho for an early poll as soon as possible after the 1983 electoral register came into force in February that year. The party’s experts believed that the new constituency boundaries were worth thirty extra seats to the Tories. Even more important, the polls showed the government to
be some fourteen and twenty points, respectively, ahead of Labour and the Alliance, with the gap growing.

Tempted by these portents, the Prime Minister flirted with the idea of a late spring election. At the annual dinner of the Confederation of British Industry, she fanned the flames of poll fever by emulating Jim Callaghan’s incursion into music-hall lyrics. In October 1978 he had inflicted upon the TUC conference his rendition of an old ditty about the expectant bridegroom: ‘There was I, a-waiting at the Church.’ In April 1983 Margaret Thatcher quoted another music-hall song of the same vintage. ‘Some say Maggie may … others say Maggie may not.’
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No one had told her that the heroine of these verses was a Liverpool prostitute.

While her party managers kept up the pressure for June, she baulked at it. ‘I must not be boxed in’, she told Cecil Parkinson at the end of a Chequers meeting about the manifesto and other election details in early April.
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One month later, again at Chequers, the party high command gathered to try and persuade her to give the green light. Willie Whitelaw, Geoffrey Howe, Norman Tebbit, Cecil Parkinson and Chief Whip Michael Jopling were there from the cabinet. Parliamentary and personal advisers included Ian Gow, Michael Spicer, Tim Bell, Gordon Reece, David Wolfson and Ferdinand Mount. All of them wanted her to go to the country. In addition to the prevailing good news from the polls, the Conservatives had won 128 seats in the local government elections on 4 May. Yet at this Chequers election summit on Sunday 8 May, Margaret Thatcher was in a most uncharacteristic mood of dither.

Her nervousness was highlighted by the silliness of her doubts. Would she be accused of cutting and running if she said yes, or of clinging to power if she said no?

How could she possibly break her promise to President Reagan that she would attend the G7 summit in Williamsburg, Virginia at the end of May? Or, if she did attend it, would she look out of place as a transitional leader lacking in authority? Political arguments highlighting the electoral advantages of attending a summit of world leaders, and historical references to the precedent set by Clement Attlee attending the Potsdam Conference during the 1945 general election campaign gradually calmed her fears.

Then she started a hare running about the negative public relations fall out from Royal Ascot, which was taking place in mid-June. Wouldn’t it look terrible
if the media was full of Tory ladies in huge hats and Tory toffs in tailcoats while she was on the stump fighting for re-election? Incredibly, it was her paranoia about the imaginary Ascot factor that finally made her plump for 9 June.

Just when she seemed to have chosen the date, the Prime Minister’s indecision became final. She thought of a new excuse for procrastination. ‘Even if I wanted to call an election’, she objected, ‘The Queen could hardly be available at such short notice.’ Ian Gow slipped out of the room, called the Palace, and returned to report that Her Majesty would be graciously pleased to see the Prime Minister at noon the following day. As Cecil Parkinson recalled her body language, ‘I am still not sure that the look she shot him was one of gratitude’.
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So the die was reluctantly cast. The ministerial and other guests departed. But even after most of them had left, Margaret Thatcher was seen by Ferdinand Mount sitting disconsolately by the embers of the fire in the great Tudor Hall at Chequers muttering, ‘I’m not sure it’s the right thing to do at all. I shall sleep on it. It’s always best to sleep on these things.’ To which Denis retorted, ‘You can’t do that, Margaret. They’ve all gone back to town saying it’s going to be the 9th. You can’t go back on that now. The horses have bolted, my dear.’
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Denis was right. The next day, the Prime Minister went to the Palace, the Queen agreed to the dissolution of Parliament and the election was announced for 9 June.

A LANDSLIDE VICTORY

Although the 1983 general election was effectively over before it began, Margaret Thatcher’s nervous wariness about the result continued. She spent several hours at the start of the campaign clearing out boxes of clothes and clutter from No. 10 in case she was not coming back. This was a reaction guided by superstition rather than psephology for the polls continued to show that the Conservatives were in an unassailable lead of between 15 and 20 per cent.

She dominated the campaign which, in contrast to 1979, was well organised by Conservative Central Office. Almost every day began with a press conference, which she ruled with a rod of iron. In the early stages she corrected Francis Pym for suggesting that the sovereignty of the Falklands might one day be negotiable. Later, she slapped him down brutally for ruminating that landslides on the whole
do not produce successful governments. Most cabinet ministers were allowed only walk-on parts at these morning conferences, since Margaret Thatcher answered nearly all the questions herself.

The rest of her electioneering day tended to be arranged for the benefit of the cameras. Photo-opportunities of the Prime Minister serving fish and chips in Yorkshire; trying out one of the earliest mobile phones (which weighed 2.2 lb, or 1 kg!) in Reading; or wading through horse manure in Cornwall. All made good footage on the evening news.

Her most awkward television moment came on BBC
Nationwide
, when a tenacious teacher, Diana Gould, repeatedly questioned her about inconsistencies in her answers as to whether the
General Belgrano
was steering towards or away from the task force when she ordered it to be torpedoed. Visibly infuriated by this unexpectedly knowledgeable interrogation from a member of the public, Margaret Thatcher came off the air firing verbal torpedoes at the programme makers. ‘Only the BBC could ask a British Prime Minister why she took action to protect
our
ships against an enemy ship that was a danger to
our
boys’, she expostulated.
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The viewers were on her side. They reacted negatively against Denis Healey talking about Margaret Thatcher having ‘rejoiced in slaughter’.
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Neil Kinnock dealt with a heckler shouting that at least Mrs Thatcher had ‘showed guts’ with the retort, ‘It’s a pity others had to leave theirs on the ground at Goose Green to prove it’.
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Both Labour spokesmen had to back down – Healey by apologising with the explanation that he had meant to say ‘glorifying in conflict’,
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while Kinnock felt obliged to write to the Welsh Guards, the 2nd Battalion of the Parachute Regiment and to the relatives of the servicemen killed or injured at Goose Green.
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The battle of the manifestos was a one-sided contest. ‘Somehow not an exciting document’, was Margaret Thatcher’s characterisation of the Conservative blueprint for the next five years.
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It promised little apart from further privatisation and local government reform in London. ‘More of the same’ could well have been its title, although the Prime Minister said she preferred Tim Bell’s label, ‘Keep on with the change’.
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By contrast, the Labour manifesto lived up to its cruel caricature as ‘the longest suicide note in history’. Margaret Thatcher found it an easy target for negative campaigning. She called it ‘the most chilling and alien Manifesto ever
put before the British people by a major political party’,
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adding for good measure, ‘It would be a suicide note for Britain too’.
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She costed Labour’s public expenditure programme over the next Parliament at a price tag of between £36 and £43 billion – a figure almost equal to the total revenue from income tax. She mocked the plans for extending the nationalisation of key industries including banks, with the punch-line, ‘Put your savings in your socks and they’d nationalise socks’.
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These attacks were so devastating that Labour candidates all over the country began losing heart. In my constituency I saw my unilateralist opponent booed off a council estate to shouts of ‘Commie!’ from people who were usually Labour supporters. There was no need to intervene in this private grief.

Towards the end of the campaign, even Margaret Thatcher began to pull her punches. Four days before the poll, she cancelled some of the Conservative Party’s planned Sunday-newspaper advertising on grounds of thrift. Earlier, on grounds of bad taste, she had vetoed a Saatchi and Saatchi poster depicting Michael Foot as a geriatric pensioner. But she laughed at the even worse taste of the comedian Kenny Everett, who joked at a final Tory election rally in Wembley Stadium: ‘Let’s bomb Russia, and let’s kick Michael Foot’s stick away.’
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The final result of the 1983 general election was a landslide victory for Margaret Thatcher. In the new House of Commons she had a stunning majority of 144 over all other parties. But on closer analysis it became clear that the result was more of a disaster for Labour than a decisive vote of confidence in Thatcherism. For the Conservatives’ share of the national vote was lower than it had been in 1979 – down from 43.9 per cent to 42.4 per cent. This less than stellar numerical result nevertheless converted into a torrent of Tory gains in individual constituencies, because the Alliance did so much damage to Labour. Although it won woefully few seats itself – only twenty-three – the Alliance cut Labour’s vote so severely that many socialist strongholds toppled into the Conservative camp.

On election night, no one was much concerned about these psephological calculations. Under Westminster’s first past the post system, winner takes all and unquestionably the big winner was Margaret Thatcher.

She was greeted at Conservative Central Office by cheering crowds and the Party Chairman, Cecil Parkinson. Then it was back to 10 Downing Street at 4.30 a.m. where the house manager greeted her with the words, ‘Welcome home’. Her second term as Prime Minister had begun.

REFLECTION

It took a while for the political world to recognise that the Falklands War had transformed both the personal image and the political prospects of Margaret Thatcher.

The period May 1982 to May 1983 was an
annus mirabilis
for her, not because she was loved but because she was needed. On defence, foreign-policy and security issues, which occupied much of her time, she was thought to be taking the right decisions in the national interest, while her unilateralist opponents were seen as disastrously wrong. On economics, she was given the benefit of the doubt with the huge bonus that she was now believed to be tough enough to stand up to the union militants. That was a future confrontation everyone was expecting. It was now thought that there was a prime minister strong enough to win it.

It was clever of her image-makers to accentuate the softer side of Margaret Thatcher’s character in the months running up to the election. This exercise may have convinced the many. The few knew perfectly well that the Prime Minister showed remarkably little interest or sympathy for the deprived, the marginalised and the down-on-their-luck at the lower end of society. She had other priorities. She was much more interested in delivering the rising tide that lifts all boats than finding welfare mechanisms to help those that were sinking.

One aspect of her positioning and presentational efforts in 1982–1983 was that she talked a great deal about values. The arguments about defence gave her the platform to champion the values of a free society versus Soviet society. She had no interest in co-existing with values of communism. Her line, well ahead of its time, was that ‘the demise of the communist creed is inevitable because it is not a creed for human beings with spirit who wish to lead their own lives under the rule of law’.
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