Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography (73 page)

It sounds callous to say it, but Mrs Thatcher’s campaign benefited from Neave’s murder, not only because it removed attention from Matthew Parris’s letter. Such terrible occasions brought out both her natural human warmth – all the Neave family were much touched by the attention and sympathy she gave them
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– and her attachment to certain simple principles. On 2 April, paying tribute to the man who, more than any other MP, had won her the leadership, she said: ‘Airey’s death diminishes us, but it will enhance our resolve that the God-given freedoms in which he believed, and
which are the foundation of our parliamentary democracy, will in the end triumph over the acts of evil men.’
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Few in the House would have disagreed with these sentiments, but equally few would have expressed them with such fervent conviction. For the public, the death of Airey Neave subliminally deepened the idea that Mrs Thatcher was serious, and stood for something important. This struck Alistair McAlpine when he attended Neave’s funeral a few days later. He noted that the funeral had, strangely, ‘quite a joyful atmosphere’. It gave the Tories an ‘incentive to win’. There was a sense that ‘This was definitely the moment, the feeling that this was her hour.’
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The campaign itself was slow to start. Reece, aware of Callaghan’s tactic of trying to get Mrs Thatcher to make mistakes, kept her quiet. Chafing to be doing something, she made her staff’s life a misery, and Ronnie Millar tried to distract her by taking her off to a musical.
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She explained the delay in a newspaper interview with one of her favourite aphorisms – ‘Time spent on reconnaissance is seldom wasted’
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– but she was not enjoying herself. When the manifesto was launched at Central Office in the opening press conference of the campaign on 11 April, the heat from 300 journalists trying to crowd in was almost unbearable, but Mrs Thatcher’s message was quite cool. Flanked by Whitelaw, Howe, Joseph, Prior, Thorneycroft, Maude, Atkins, Carrington and Pym, she wished to give an impression of unity and calm. She was more concerned to avoid being trapped than to say anything new. She promised – though she hated it – to honour the Clegg Commission’s pay findings; she said that there could be no sudden end to industrial subsidy, and she pushed aside arguments about the distribution of the ‘national cake’ by saying that the point was to create more cake ‘before we can decide how the extra shall be sliced up’.
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Her more emotional speeches – disparaged by Chris Patten as ‘hot-gospelling’ – were confined to the ticket-only rallies which she addressed across the country.

At her adoption meeting in Finchley the same day, Mrs Thatcher spoke of the ‘choice between good and evil’
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for each person, and implied that such a choice now presented itself. At a rally in Cardiff five days later, she exclaimed: ‘Now, Mr Chairman, because I hold some of these views, I am dubbed as a reactionary. “Maggie Thatcher, reactionary.” Well, Mr Chairman, there’s a lot to react against!’
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Then she delivered one of her classic self-descriptions: ‘in politics I’ve learnt something that you in Wales are born knowing. It’s this: if you’ve got a message, preach it! [
applause
] The Old Testament prophets didn’t go out into the highways saying, “Brothers, I want consensus.” They said, “This is my faith and my vision! This is what I passionately believe!” And they preached it.’
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This refusal of consensus
was something which Callaghan tried to exploit, but it also helped her dominate the debate. At the same time as she proclaimed her faith, though, Mrs Thatcher made raids into enemy territory. One of her most frequent themes was the half-hidden extremism of Labour, contrasted with the sturdy patriotism (which she had certainly not noticed in her youthful speeches at the time) of Clement Attlee’s generation. At Cardiff, this was expressed in one of Ronnie Millar’s dire puns, which nevertheless, to pursue his beery metaphor, went down nicely: ‘Labour today is like a pub where the mild is running out. Soon all that’s left will be bitter, and all that’s bitter will be Left.’ And in Birmingham, she took the example of the city’s famous son, Joe Chamberlain, to show how a politician may change his party, but remain ‘passionately true to his beliefs’.
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She was trailing her coat for converts. In the course of the campaign, the press reported that Harold Wilson’s wife, Mary, was thinking of voting for Mrs Thatcher. And behind the scenes Marcia Williams, Lady Falkender (Harold Wilson’s former political secretary), was working with Reece and McAlpine. She had confided in McAlpine, who was a friend, that she admired Mrs Thatcher and would like to help her. At discreet meetings in the flat of the pro-Thatcher businessman James Hanson,
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McAlpine effected the introductions to Reece and an aide of Lord Thorneycroft. The purpose of the meetings was for Lady Falkender to convey to the Tory campaigners her assessment of what the Labour Party was thinking.
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The Reece plan for the campaign was to get Mrs Thatcher shown in the right television pictures. Indeed, Reece wanted to do away with the London press conferences, which he saw only as traps, but was overruled by his boss because she felt it essential to be in London each day to control the campaign at Central Office. The most important coverage, in Reece’s view, was the least political – the early-evening television news watched by women, the local papers reporting favourably the leader’s visit to their area, rather than the national ones trying to take apart every word she said. He got her out of London, lockstitching clothes in Leicester, wiring herself and Denis up to a heart machine in Milton Keynes, joining tea-tasters in a factory and, famously, cuddling a calf on a farm in Suffolk for thirteen minutes to get the right camera angles. These techniques are now considered old hat, but then they were novelties, the more novel because they were being performed by the first woman to lead a British political party. She was blonde, 5 foot 5, size 14 and weighing 9½ stone:
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she was
different, and she was bursting with energy. Frank Johnson, then parliamentary sketch-writer for the
Daily Telegraph
, accompanied Mrs Thatcher to a Cadbury chocolate factory in the marginal constituency of Birmingham, Selly Oak. He described the visit as:

the most picturesque which your correspondent has witnessed in a decade or so of observing politicians trying to become Prime Minister. Mrs Thatcher would descend on a chocolate woman … They would have a conversation. Because of the din, neither could hear the other … the leader of the Opposition would inevitably be urged to try chocolate packing herself. The problem, of course, would be to stop her. Maniacally, she would raid the hazel crispy clusters and shove them in passing boxes … What a scene! The genius at Conservative Central Office who thought it up must get a knighthood.
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He did. Reece became Sir Gordon in 1986.
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An added reason for stunts of this sort was that Mrs Thatcher, as she had proved at the start of her leadership, was very good at them. The artificiality which she sometimes showed in the television studios melted away when confronted with members of the public. Her actressy ability combined with her practical streak and her genuine interest in shopping and how things are made. She loved discoursing about how convenient teabags were, or the best way of mending a garment, and loved hurtling up and down streets, always rushing, always talking. Although Mrs Thatcher was often accused of being humourless, and it was certainly the case that she did not always ‘get’ jokes, she always had a sense of occasion and of fun. She injected drama into these visits, and made the members of the public caught up in them amused and excited to be there.

During the campaign, Michael Cockerell followed Mrs Thatcher round for the BBC, compiling a documentary about what he saw as her campaign made for the media – ‘the most professionally organised ever’. He noted two Margaret Thatchers, the ‘crusading Iron Maiden’, woman of principle,
and ‘Our Maggie’, the normal housewife. Mrs Thatcher was interviewed for the programme. She said there were ‘at least three’ Margaret Thatchers – ‘There is the logical one, there’s the instinctive one and there’s just one at home’ – and she was surprisingly frank about how she played everything for the camera. In a passage in which her manner now seems almost comically flirtatious, she explained the incident with the calf: ‘The press say, “Look, we don’t want just another photograph of you, with a hundred, uh, bullocks looking in
superb
condition.” There was a beautiful calf, and after all, we had 70 or 80 cameramen around with us. They have to do their job …’
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It was important to consider, she said, ‘what you’re like in three dimensions’. She emphasized that she had to get everything right because ‘There’s only one chance for women. ’Tis the law of life.’
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This determination to make the most of her one chance brought out her showman’s flair, and contrasted with Callaghan, good performer though he was, who perhaps by this time (he was sixty-seven and had held all the main offices of state) had too little to prove. ‘I am not eaten up with ambition to get here, like she is,’ he told Bernard Donoughue in 10 Downing Street.
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Nevertheless, Mrs Thatcher’s campaign was not strikingly successful. It suffered from beginning so well in front. Opinion polls which began by giving the Conservatives a lead of 10 per cent or so narrowed quite sharply. There was some feeling that the Saatchi campaigns which had been so popular in the previous year were too frivolous and clever for the electorate. One, shown on 19 April, depicted the ‘International Prosperity Race’, an athletic contest turned by Labour into an obstacle course. The athletes were burdened with large weights of taxation, unemployment and so on. The crowd protested at the handicaps and Tory managers took over. Another showed a patient in a bed covered with the Union Jack, suffering from a cold and sneezing. Thanks to Labour, said the voiceover, ‘That cold seems to have turned to double pneumonia.’ Film of a stereotypical German in a Bavarian hat and with a cigar showed him doing much better than the British. These were amusing and innovative approaches to political broadcasting, but to some they all looked slightly silly. There seemed to be a disjunction between an election whose result could be momentous, and a campaign which did not want to emphasize this too much.

With the passage of time, the press got to work on those areas of tax and spending which the Conservatives did not much want to talk about. Would the Tories break the link between earnings and pensions? Yes, but
they were reluctant to say so in so many words. Would there be new, or increased, health charges? Would they double VAT? Callaghan havered about driving this point home because he feared that if Labour won he too would have to increase VAT,
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but towards the end of April Labour started to push much harder on tax and prices. Michael Portillo, whose job it was to brief Mrs Thatcher on the contents of the press every morning of the campaign, remembered drafting an answer which said: ‘We won’t double VAT, or anything like.’ When Geoffrey Howe crossed out ‘or anything like’, he realized for the first time how big were the tax changes contemplated.
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In Central Office, to Mrs Thatcher’s annoyance, Thorneycroft worried that the tone of the campaign might be too extreme.
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After two weeks, the Conservative campaign felt as if it was stalling. Polls on 25 April showed the gap between the parties down to 5 per cent (Gallup) and 6 per cent (MORI). That night, after a successful rally in Edinburgh, Mrs Thatcher was dining with colleagues in her hotel in Edinburgh, when Janet Young,
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the deputy chairman of the party, returned to the room from a telephone conversation with Thorneycroft and conveyed to her his view that she now needed to share a platform with Ted Heath to show unity and rescue centrist votes. According to Michael Dobbs, who was present, Mrs Thatcher said, ‘No, I won’t have it.’ There was a furious row and she stormed out in tears, being comforted by Carol. In Dobbs’s view, they were tears of frustration at men telling her she wasn’t good enough.
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Her sense of upset persisted, exacerbated by her tiredness; and at the press conference back in London two days later Mrs Thatcher reacted with exaggerated fury to two unsympathetic journalists. She asked Geoffrey Goodman of the
Daily Mirror
, who asked a question about the effect on jobs of technological change, ‘Why are you getting so
frightened
?’ And to David Holmes of the BBC, she said, ‘Where have you been this last fifty years?’ Her manner and also her voice showed signs of strain, and her organizers cancelled a speech and walkabout in Fulham that day. A MORI poll in the
Daily Express
the following morning brought the Tory lead down to 3 per cent, and gave Callaghan his biggest lead yet as the ‘best
PM’ – 19 per cent ahead of Mrs Thatcher. Tory jitters were also increased, at least in the memory of some sources, by advance notice of an NOP poll which actually gave Labour a 0.7 per cent lead. This was not published in the
Daily Mail
until 30 April, so it is strange if the information it contained was already circulating the previous week. The reasons for this delayed publication, if such it was, are not clear. Certainly rumours about bad polls helped fray some nerves. Giving a hostile judgment shortly after the campaign ended, Chris Patten told David Butler that the Conservatives lost the campaign – though they won the election – ‘because they had a leader who was unpopular, and they had no adequate economic spokesman’. He remembered the Tuesday nine days before the poll as a day of ‘desperate panic’,
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though he may have been getting the date wrong – Mrs Thatcher’s embarrassing performance at the press conference was on Friday 27 April.

Looking back, one can see that the Tory jitters of the penultimate week of the campaign failed to take into account the underlying situation. Famously, it was Jim Callaghan who was clear on the subject. Driving with Bernard Donoughue round Parliament Square about halfway through the campaign, he analysed the situation with detachment: ‘It does not matter what you say or do. There is a shift in what the public wants and what it approves. I suspect there is now such a sea-change – and it is for Mrs Thatcher.’
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In this sense, although she certainly made some tonal mistakes, Mrs Thatcher was right about the almost prophetic message of change in her campaign, and the more cautious centrists, such as Thorneycroft, were wrong. She displayed her great gift for getting to the simple heart of an often complicated public issue and conveying it urgently. She stood for something which she presented as necessary, and which she contrived to make seem attractively new and yet also reassuringly old fashioned. Perhaps the most telling television programme to convey this was
The Granada 500
, a forum offered to all three party leaders separately, in which each appeared before an audience in Bolton, chosen as a town whose seats were highly marginal. On his appearance on the programme, Callaghan scored badly, being seen by some to have bullied a nurse. Gavyn Davies,
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who worked in Callaghan’s Policy Unit, told David Butler after the election result that Mrs Thatcher’s appearance on the programme had ‘struck all the right notes’.
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