Margaret Thatcher: The Autobiography (95 page)

A further step was to involve senior Cabinet ministers in the strategy for the next election. In June Willie Whitelaw and John Wakeham, the Chief Whip, sent me a memorandum urging me to set up the group of ministers which was to be officially known as the Strategy Group and, no doubt to the great pleasure of its male members, was soon known by the press as the ‘A-Team’. I agreed that, apart from Willie and John, the group should consist of Geoffrey Howe, Nigel Lawson, Douglas Hurd and Norman Tebbit.

At about the same time as the Strategy Group was established I set up eleven Party policy groups. On this occasion I made the chairman of each group the Cabinet minister whose responsibilities covered its area of interest. Apart from the obvious areas – the economy, jobs, foreign affairs and defence, agriculture, the NHS – there were separate groups on the family (under Nicholas Edwards, Welsh Secretary) and young people (under John Moore – the nearest we had in Cabinet to a young person). At least on this occasion, unlike 1983, the groups were set up promptly and for the most part managed to send in their reports on time.

When Parliament reassembled the Party was in a quite different frame of mind than it had been just a few months earlier. We had a brief legislative programme on the advice of David Young, so crucial legislation would not be abandoned if we went for an early election the following summer. And our position in the opinion polls had begun to improve.

The compilation of documents which constitute the Party’s plans for an election campaign is traditionally called the ‘War Book’. On 23 December Norman sent me the first draft ‘as a Christmas present’. I felt a new enthusiasm as I considered the fresh policies and the battle for them which would be required in 1987.

On Thursday 8 January I discussed with Norman and others the papers he had sent me about the election campaign. We met at Alistair McAlpine’s house in order to escape detection by the press, which had already started to speculate about election dates. Many details of the campaign had not been worked out as yet, but I found myself largely in agreement with the suggestions. I did, however, have one continuing worry; this was about the advertising. Several months earlier I had asked whether Tim Bell, who had worked with me on previous elections, could do so again now. I understood that he was a consultant to Saatchis. But in fact the rift between them was greater than I had imagined and the suggestion was never taken up. I might have been prepared to insist, but this would have caused more important problems with Norman and Central Office. In any case I continued to see Tim socially. At this stage in January, though, I still hoped that Saatchis would exhibit the political nous and creativity we had had from them in the past.

I regarded the manifesto as my main responsibility. Brian Griffiths and Robin Harris, from my Policy Unit, brought together in a single paper the proposals which had come in from ministers and policy groups. We discussed this at Chequers on Sunday 1 February. Nigel Lawson, Norman Tebbit and Nick Ridley were there. It was as important at this stage to rule out as to rule in different proposals. It was at this meeting that the main shape of the manifesto proposals became clear.

We agreed to include the aim of a 25 per cent basic rate of income tax and I kept out of the manifesto any commitment to transferable tax allowances between husband and wife which, if they had been implemented along the lines of the earlier Green Paper, would have been extremely expensive. I commissioned further work on candidates for privatization which I wanted to be spelt out clearly in the manifesto itself. Education would, we all agreed, be one of the crucial areas for new proposals in the manifesto. There must be a core curriculum to ensure that the basic subjects were taught to all children. There must be graded tests or benchmarks against which children’s knowledge should be judged. All schools should have greater financial autonomy. There must be a new
per capita
funding system which, along with ‘open enrolment’,
would mean that successful, popular schools were financially rewarded and enabled to expand. There must be more powers for head teachers. Finally, and most controversially, schools must be given the power to apply for what at this stage we were describing as ‘direct grant’ status, by which we meant that they could become in effect ‘independent state schools’ – a phrase that the DES kept trying to remove from my speeches in favour of the bureaucratically flavoured ‘grant-maintained schools’ – outside the control of Local Education Authorities.

Housing was another area in which radical proposals were being considered: Nick Ridley’s main ideas – all of which eventually found their way into the manifesto – were to give groups of tenants the right to form tenants’ co-operatives and individual tenants the right to transfer ownership of their house (or flat) to a housing association or other approved institution – in other words to swap landlords. We would also reform local authority housing accounts to stop housing rents being used to subsidize the rate fund when they should have gone towards repairs and renovation.

We were by now under a good deal of political pressure on the Health Service and discussed at our meeting how to respond. Norman Fowler at the 1986 Party Conference had set out a number of targets, backed up by special allocations of public spending, for increases in the number of particular sorts of operation. This announcement had gone well. I was reluctant to add the Health Service to the list of areas in which we were proposing fundamental reform – not least because not enough work had yet been done on it. The direction of reform which I wanted to see was one towards bringing down waiting lists by ensuring that money moved with the patient, rather than got lost within the bureaucratic maze of the NHS. But that left so many questions still unanswered that I eventually ruled out any substantial new proposals on Health for the manifesto.

After the meeting I wrote to Cabinet ministers asking them to bring forward any proposals which required policy approval for implementation in the next Parliament. To knock all these submissions into a coherent whole I established a small Manifesto Committee that reported directly to me. Chaired by John MacGregor, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, its other members were Brian Griffiths, Stephen Sherbourne, Robin Harris and John O’Sullivan, a former Associate Editor of
The Times
, who drafted the manifesto.

As a party which had been in government for eight years, we had to dispel any idea that we were stale and running out of ideas. We therefore
had to advance a number of clear, specific, new and well-worked-out reforms. At the same time we had to protect ourselves against the gibe: if these ideas are so good, why haven’t you introduced them before? We did so by presenting our reforms as the third stage of a rolling Thatcherite programme. Looking back, once the manifesto was published, we heard no more about the Government running out of steam.

Because a good deal of misleading comment has been made about the background to and course of the 1987 general election campaign it is worth setting some matters straight at the outset. According to some versions of events this was all about a battle between rival Tory advertising agencies; according to other accounts the main participants – particularly myself – behaved in such an unbalanced way that it is difficult to see why we were all not carried off to one of our new NHS hospitals by the men in white coats. This was not to be a happy campaign; but it was a successful one and that is what counts. There were disagreements – but good old-fashioned stand-up rows, in which most of us regret what we have said and try to forget about it without bearing grudges, feature in all election campaigns.

While the manifesto was being drafted, I was discussing with Norman Tebbit what I hoped would be the final shape of the campaign and my own role in it. At our meeting on Thursday 16 April we went over press conference themes, advertising and Party Election Broadcasts. By now I was in a mood for an early – June – election. I felt in my bones that the popular mood was with us and that Labour’s public relations gimmicks were starting to look just a little tired.

As is the way of these things, the most appropriate date eventually wrote itself into our programme – Thursday 11 June. By then we would have seen the results of the local elections which, as in 1983, would be run through the number-crunchers of Central Office to make it into a useful guide for a general election. It would be supplemented by other private polls Norman had commissioned: this was particularly necessary for Scotland and London where there were no local elections that year. Some polling in individual key constituencies would also be done: though such are the problems of sampling in constituency polls that no one would attach too much weight to these. I saw this analysis and heard senior colleagues’ views at Chequers on Sunday: I knew by then that the manifesto was in almost final form. I had been through the final text with the draftsmen and with Nigel and Norman on that Saturday.

We had one last disagreement. Nigel wished to include a commitment to zero inflation in the next Parliament. I thought this was a hostage to fortune. Events unfortunately proved my caution right.

As always, I slept on the decision about whether to go to the country, and then on Monday 11 May I arranged to see the Queen at 12.25 p.m. to seek a dissolution of Parliament for an election on 11 June.

In my case, preparation for the election involved more than politics. I also had to be dressed for the occasion. I had already commissioned from Aquascutum suits, jackets and skirts – ‘working clothes’ for the campaign.

I took a close interest in clothes, as most women do: but it was also extremely important that the impression I gave was right for the political occasion.

From the time of my arrival in Downing Street, Crawfie helped me choose my wardrobe. Together we would discuss style, colour and cloth. Everything had to do duty on many occasions so tailored suits seemed right. On foreign visits, it was, of course, particularly important to be appropriately dressed. We always paid attention to the colours of the national flag when deciding on what I should wear. The biggest change, however, was the new style I adopted when I visited the Soviet Union in the spring of 1987, for which I wore a black coat with shoulder pads, that Crawfie had seen in the Aquascutum window, and a marvellous fox fur hat. (Aquascutum have provided me with most of my suits ever since.)

With the televising of the House of Commons after November 1989 new considerations arose. Stripes and checks looked attractive and cheerful in the flesh but they could dazzle the television viewer. People watching television would also notice whether I had worn the same suit on successive occasions and even wrote in about it. So from now on Crawfie always kept a note of what I wore each week for Prime Minister’s Questions. Out of these notes a diary emerged and each outfit received its own name, usually denoting the occasion it was first worn. The pages read something like a travel diary: Paris Opera, Washington Pink, Reagan Navy, Toronto Turquoise, Tokyo Blue, Kremlin Silver, Peking Black and last but not least English Garden. But now my mind was on the forthcoming campaign: it was time to lay out my navy and white check suit, to be known as ‘Election ′87’.

On Tuesday 19 May, I chaired the first press conference of the campaign to launch our manifesto: the Alliance’s had already appeared, and disappeared, and Labour’s, which would be more notable for omissions than
contents, would be launched the same day. Our manifesto launch was not quite all that I had wished. The press conference room at Central Office was far too crowded, hot and noisy. Cabinet ministers were crowded in too, so much so that the television shots of the conference looked truly awful. Nick Ridley explained our housing policy and I hoped that the journalists might be tempted actually to read the detailed policies of the manifesto. I was certainly determined that our candidates should do so and I took them through it in my speech to their conference in Central Hall, Westminster, the following morning.

But I also used the speech for another purpose. Our political weak point was the social services, especially Health, so I went out of my way to tell the candidates, and through them the voters, that the Government was committed to the principle of a National Health Service which I said was ‘safe only in our hands’. That done, I devoted most of the campaign to stressing our strong points on the economy and defence. This did not prevent Health emerging later in the campaign as an issue; but it meant that we had armed ourselves against Labour’s attack and done our best to soothe the voters’ anxieties.

Our first regular press conference of the campaign was on Friday (22 May). The subject was officially defence and George Younger made the opening statement. We had suddenly been given a great opportunity to sink the Alliance parties which some Tory strategists – but not I – thought were the principal electoral threat to us. Instead, the two Davids sank themselves. The passage in our manifesto claimed that their joint defence policy, because it amounted to unilateral nuclear disarmament by degrees, would just as surely as Labour’s eventually produce a ‘frightened and fellow-travelling Britain’ vulnerable to Soviet blackmail. This was not, of course, an allegation of a lack of patriotism, but a forecast of what weakness would inevitably lead to. David Owen, however, failed to make this distinction and took enormous offence. We could hardly believe our luck when, for several days, he concentrated the public’s attention on our strongest card, defence, and his weakest one, his connection with the Liberal Party’s sandal-wearing unilateralists. The Alliance never recovered from this misjudgement.

But we were not without our difficulties. I was questioned on education, on which it was suggested that there were contradictions between my and Ken Baker’s line on ‘opted-out’, grant-maintained schools. In fact, we were not suggesting that the new schools would be fee paying in the
sense of being private schools: they would remain in the public sector. Moreover, the Secretary of State for Education has to give his approval if a school – whether grant-maintained or not – wishes to change from being a comprehensive school to becoming a grammar school.