Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography (72 page)

Ignoring Mrs Thatcher’s plea for an early poll, Callaghan chose the last possible date for a general election now open to him – 3 May.
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He hoped by doing so to allow plenty of time to turn the attention of the campaign away from Labour’s problems and on to Mrs Thatcher herself, contrasting his own experience, moderation and reliability with what he thought were her shrillness and extremism. For better or worse, Callaghan believed, ‘she is the dominant personality of the campaign. If we win, it will be because people cannot take her.’
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It was for this reason that Callaghan broke the tradition that it is the incumbent who refuses the invitation to a television debate between the party leaders which is always offered but which never took place until the general election of 2010. Although he did not underestimate Mrs Thatcher’s debating skills, Callaghan calculated, surely correctly, that she had more to lose in a debate than he, and so indicated that he would accept the television invitation. Mrs Thatcher was very keen to accept it too. She was terrified of being considered terrified, particularly being terrified ‘as a woman’,
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and wanted to be seen on equal terms with the Prime Minister. Chris Patten, too, advised her to have the debate. Those ranked on the other side of the argument, though, weighed more heavily. They included Willie Whitelaw, Lord Thorneycroft, Gordon Reece and everyone at Saatchis. All of them believed that the debate would be make-or-break for Mrs Thatcher, but not for Callaghan, who was a much better-known quantity, and that the possibility of ‘break’ when the Conservatives were ahead in the polls anyway was not worth the risk. There was also a view that, because of her sex, it would have been bad for Mrs Thatcher both if she had lost and if she had won. If she had lost, she would have demonstrated straightforward incompetence. If she had won, that would have been a woman humiliating a man, and this would have been unsettling for many male voters. As Thorneycroft put it to David Butler, ‘many men would have resented it. They would have said, “That’s my wife” and it wouldn’t have been a good thing.’
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Gordon Reece was so worried that Mrs Thatcher would accept the invitation to debate that he actually hid the first letter of invitation from her and refused it, hoping that it would somehow be swept aside by events.
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A second letter arrived, however, and Mrs Thatcher challenged Reece about why she had not been shown the first. Reece remembered: ‘All the moisture in my mouth dried up because the row was so terrible.’
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Mrs Thatcher said, ‘Gordon, you’d better go home.’ In the early hours of the morning, Reece, by this time drunk, rang Tim Bell and said, ‘It’s all over. My career is finished,’ but Bell advised him simply to return to work the next day and say nothing.
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He did so, and, somehow or other, his view prevailed. Comforting herself with the excuse that the debate would give an unwarranted advantage to the Liberal leader, David Steel, because the television authorities would have to make some sort of provision for him in all this, Mrs Thatcher refused – writing, as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, ‘Personally, I believe that issues and policies should decide elections, not personalities. We should stick to that approach. We are not electing a president, we are choosing a government.’
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In 10 Downing Street, her decision was greeted with relief. Callaghan had felt he must be seen to be ready to debate, and Mrs Thatcher be seen to refuse, but he had been worried about it. Bernard Donoughue recorded: ‘He [Callaghan] is very pleased that Thatcher has declined to go on television against him – a relief to us all, since I think she would have done well. She is much more effective than most of our people – or her advisers apparently – seem to realise.’
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For Reece and his allies, though, this was an important victory, one that kept their strategy intact. As David Butler noted Reece saying just after the election, ‘He [Reece] did not want the election to be about the election. He wanted it to be about what happened last winter.’
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In a sudden flurry, starting in early February, the Conservatives redrafted their manifesto. On 5 February, Angus Maude wrote to Mrs Thatcher telling her that the manifesto would be reworked. On this letter, she scribbled: ‘I think the existing draft will have to be radically changed consequent on recent events and on much more robust union policy. But the general approach of limited objectives first (i.e. tax cuts etc. to encourage wealth creation) remains. In my view the average person and a lot of non-average as well, wants “tax cuts and order”.’
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When the second draft of the new version reached her in March, Mrs Thatcher wrote a note on the title page to Chris Patten, who was in charge of the drafting: ‘
Chris
– have read through this with considerable dismay. See comments.’ She set to work on the section entitled ‘Our Five Main Tasks’, slashing whatever she thought was too vague or feeble. Where the draft said, ‘Our economic weakness has been partly caused by failure to accept that the interests of all classes within the nation
are ultimately the same,’ Mrs Thatcher put a line through it and wrote, ‘No it hasn’t – it isn’t.’ Where the draft said, ‘It would be dishonest to pretend that substantial cuts can be made painlessly,’ she wrote, ‘It depends where you make them.’ Beside the assertion, ‘Nor can we go on, year after year, tearing ourselves apart in increasingly bitter and calamitous industrial disputes,’ Mrs Thatcher wrote, ‘The chances are we shall for quite a time.’

Mrs Thatcher was irritated by the consensual tone which still kept creeping in. On trade union reform, the draft declared, ‘We have proposed a “moderates’ charter” based on three changes …’ She scrawled, ‘Don’t be “moderate” in the defence of liberty or the rule of law. It is the way to lose both.’ On picketing, the draft stated, ‘We will clarify the law to ensure that its provisions against such behaviour are enforceable.’ She wrote, ‘How. I haven’t seen any proposals that will do this. This
must
be more specific.’ And where the draft, on the subject of pay bargaining, meandered, ‘those involved in pay bargaining … must understand properly the scope for total increase in pay and that unemployment is bound to rise if this figure is exceeded while monetary policy remains, as it must, under firm control,’ Mrs Thatcher wrote, ‘This is
awful
.’ In all references to the EEC, she tried to excise anything which offered more power to Europe. When the draft spoke of ‘common economic and industrial problems that lie beyond the scope of any national government’, she cut the second half of the phrase. Where it suggested ‘a more positive approach’ to the Common Agricultural Policy and the Common Fisheries Policy, she added, ‘This is not quite right. It looks as if we shall be more pliant.’ Throughout, she sought to toughen everything up. Yet at the
s
ame time her natural caution showed through. Whenever a commitment seemed too specific, she wrote, ‘Hostage!’ or ‘hostage to fortune’.
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Despite the ferocity of Mrs Thatcher’s assault on the drafts, the final product was not at all rabid in tone. Indeed, the foreword which appeared under her name now began with a rejection of dogma: ‘For me, the heart of politics is not political theory, it is people and how they want to live their lives.’ Power was being tilted away from people and towards the state: ‘This election may be the last chance we have to reverse that process.’ She placed herself as the voice of the future – the leader who could achieve greatness for the country – but she saw this achievement as a restoration of the past. Some said that a once great nation could not recover: ‘I don’t accept that. I believe we not only can, we must.’ Her party’s manifesto was based ‘above all on liberty of the people under the law’. She appealed to an almost wartime feeling of ‘we’re all in this together’: ‘The things we have in common as a nation far outnumber those that set us apart.’

The Conservatives proclaimed that they had five main tasks – economic
and social health, the restoration of incentives, the upholding of Parliament and the rule of law (in part a coded phrase referring to trade union overmightiness), support for family life (for example, council house sales, where a tenant’s right to buy was promised) and parent power in schools, and the strengthening of defence. On trade unions, the sentence which Mrs Thatcher had questioned about ‘tearing ourselves apart’ stayed. There were three specific reforms proposed – the removal of immunities from secondary picketing, a proper ballot about a closed shop and the right of individual appeal against membership, and secret and postal ballots, paid for out of public money, for union elections and strike votes. Pay policies were condemned, and the manifesto made no mention of the Pay Comparability Commission, chaired by Professor Hugh Clegg, whose findings, for electoral reasons and much against Mrs Thatcher’s will, the Tories decided they must promise to honour. In a concession to her future Chancellor, Mrs Thatcher did allow Geoffrey Howe his beloved point about ‘concerted action’ by conceding the need for what the manifesto called ‘more open and informed discussion of the Government’s economic objectives (as happens, for example, in Germany and other countries)’.

On taxes, under the heading of ‘A more prosperous country’, the manifesto declared, ‘We shall cut income tax at all levels to reward hard work,’ but offered no particular rate. There would be cuts in public spending, but the document was deliberately vague about where these would fall.
Sotto voce
, the manifesto explained that income tax cuts could not be paid for without a ‘switch to some extent from taxes on earnings to taxes on spending’. The five-year-old promise to abolish the domestic rating system was repeated only to be postponed: ‘cutting income tax must take priority for the time being over abolition of the domestic rating system.’ Nationalization was denounced, but denationalization was not strongly proclaimed. Only shipbuilding and aerospace were specifically marked for denationalization; it was also promised that shares in the National Freight Corporation would be sold off. There would be better police pay, a new British Nationality Act and firmer immigration controls, and higher defence spending. On Europe, the manifesto called for a ‘single voice’ in foreign policy, but was in other respects rather cool. ‘National payments into the budget should be more closely related to ability to pay,’ it said, a low-key harbinger of a row to come.

By the admittedly low standards of the genre, the Conservative manifesto reads well. It is clear and coherent, and sets out a scale of priorities. It was reticent, but not dishonest, about the need for spending cuts and for an increase in VAT. It expressed a sense of urgency without lapsing into extremism, and it offered a clear difference from Labour’s message of
reassurance. It also represented an enormous amount of policy work, fairly well digested. Adam Ridley, who by the time of publication had already had a transition meeting with Bernard Donoughue, the man he expected to succeed in the No. 10 Policy Unit, remembered: ‘I was excited. We had prepared well.’
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For three years, the Research Department had produced shadow spending White Papers which were ready to go to the Treasury after the election. Mrs Thatcher herself had seen Sir Ian Bancroft,
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the head of the home Civil Service, to discuss her transition to prime minister, but had forbidden all her shadow ministers, except for Geoffrey Howe, to see the permanent secretaries of their putative departments, since she did not wish to commit herself in advance to choosing who would get what job. Kenneth Stowe,
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who, as Callaghan’s principal private secretary, would be hers for the transition, talked to Bernard Donoughue about the process; ‘Ken says she gives the impression of wanting to run the whole show herself. It is clear that the Civil Service is viewing the prospect of her arriving with some dismay.’
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In modern, televisual election campaigns, which are always so tightly controlled, the press looks for what it calls a gaffe. Thanks to Gordon Reece’s preoccupation with getting the right television images, the campaign of May 1979 was perhaps the first such election. The gaffe duly came, though not through television, even before the campaign had been officially launched. In 1978, Matthew Parris,
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a young member of the Conservative Research Department, who dealt with much of the Leader’s correspondence, had replied to a Mrs Evelyn Collingwood, of Erith (Mrs Thatcher’s first electoral stamping ground), who had complained about the state of her council house, as follows:

At Mrs Thatcher’s request I am replying on her behalf to your recent letter. I hope you will not think me too blunt if I say that it may well be that your council accommodation is unsatisfactory, but considering the fact that you have been unable to buy your own accommodation you are lucky to have been given something, which the rest of us are paying for out of our taxes.
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This was a freelance expression of Parris’s own irritation with Mrs Collingwood’s querulous tone, and had not been cleared with Mrs Thatcher.

The
Daily Mirror
had obtained a copy of this letter, and sat on it until the electoral moment judged most damaging to the Tory campaign. When the story broke on the
Mirror
’s front page on 30 March, including words of apology from Mrs Thatcher – ‘It was offensive and lacked understanding’ – the Labour Party printed three million copies for delivery to every council house of every marginal seat in the country. The story could be made big because it seemed to confirm the fear many voters had that Mrs Thatcher was a divisive figure, the fierce spokesman of her own class, the fierce opponent of those below her.

That morning, however, while Mrs Thatcher was attending a charity function in her constituency, a bomb went off under Airey Neave’s car as he attempted to leave the House of Commons car park. He died that day. The bomb had been planted by the Irish National Liberation Army, an Irish Republican splinter group. Republicans were keen to murder Neave, chiefly because he was close to Mrs Thatcher, but also because his approach to the subject of Northern Ireland was closer to integrationist moderate Unionism than had been the policy under Heath. From their point of view, his murder was worth while, since from then on the anti-Unionist search for ‘power-sharing’ dominated Tory thinking, even though Mrs Thatcher herself never much cared for it. Republicans believed that power-sharing – the division of the spoils between Unionists and Nationalists – gave them more chance for ultimate success in Northern Ireland than did the integration of the province with the rest of the United Kingdom. In the period of opposition, Mrs Thatcher had devoted very little personal attention to the problem of Northern Ireland, trusting Neave to develop the right policies himself. His death brought out her strongest native feeling on the subject – her hatred of giving any sort of victory to terrorists. Outside her house in Flood Street later that day, Mrs Thatcher told the BBC: ‘Some devils got him. They must never, never, never be allowed to triumph.’
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