Although this extreme pessimism was a minority view within the party, as we dispersed for the long summer recess the mood was more of foreboding than anticipation. Most Tory MPs thought an election was coming in the autumn, and many felt that the chances of winning it were at best fifty–fifty. These anxieties were heightened by opinion polls in early August showing that Labour was ahead with a four-point lead.
August is a month that is usually helpful to the government of the day. But 1978 was an exception because the ‘laughing boys’, led by Tim Bell, took the initiative of introducing into British politics the first example of negative campaigning. Their initial poster was so effective that it derailed Callaghan’s plans for an early election.
The name the ‘laughing boys’ derived from a lunch party at the Thatcher’s country flat in Scotney Castle in July 1978. Its main objective was for election photographs to be taken of the leader looking relaxed en famille. However, the image of a happy family was difficult to portray on this particular morning because all four Thatchers were in a vile temper. Denis was irate because he had been ordered to cancel his Sunday game of golf. Margaret was furious because Denis had spontaneously invited the barrister Tricia Murray, wife of the DJ Pete Murray, to stay on for lunch after doing an interview for a book she was writing on Margaret Thatcher. The presence of this unexpected guest thwarted the leader’s plan to discuss election tactics with her key media advisers. As for Mark and Carol, they were having a quarrel of their own which put both of them in bolshie moods. However, their bad temper was offset by the arrival of Messrs Bell, Reece and Millar in the sunniest of moods. They had turned up early in the vicinity of Scotney, and to kill time had polished off a couple of bottles of champagne in a local pub.
While downing the champagne, Ronnie Millar regaled his friends with an anecdote from his naval days about a commander whose invariable wardroom order was ‘I’ll have a piece of gin, please’. On arrival in the drawing room of Scotney, when Margaret Thatcher asked Millar what he would like to drink, he again imitated the commander’s punch-line. This sent Reece and Bell into paroxysms of merriment. Unaware of the champagne, and oblivious to the point of the joke, the lady was bemused but pretended to be amused. She promptly christened the jesters ‘my laughing boys’, and the name stuck. On the day, it relieved the tension, which was a task they all became good at during the next twelve years.
Margaret Thatcher already trusted Ronnie Millar, a playwright friend of Noël Coward, who had been sculpting the best lines in her conference speeches since 1975. She had also come to depend on Gordon Reece, a television producer who softened her image, deepened her voice, advised her on clothes and accompanied her on media interviews. She had appointed him Director of Publicity at Central Office in early 1978. For his part, Reece venerated Margaret Thatcher with devotion not far short of idolatry. This spirit of adoration soon spread to Tim Bell, who was the toughest and savviest of the ‘laughing boys’. He had entered the advertising industry straight from his North London grammar school, and climbed the ladder fast by his creative originality on big campaigns. In the summer of 1978 he was Managing Director of Saatchi and Saatchi,*8 which Reece chose to handle the Conservative Party account.
Tim Bell, who was the only Conservative voter in the hierarchy of Saatchi and Saatchi, soon hit it off with Margaret Thatcher, who found him a kindred spirit. They shared similar grammar school backgrounds, an aversion to consensus politics and a preference for blunt speaking. At their first meeting, in her room at the House of Commons, she told him: ‘You will find that politicians have very large fingers and very large toes. You must be frightfully careful not to tread on them by accident.’
Bell respectfully agreed to watch his step among the political classes. Then she startled him with more personal advice: ‘I, however, have no fingers and no toes, and I insist you tell me the truth at all times, however painful you think it might be for me.’
Her final warning was: ‘If you paint a picture of me that isn’t true, and I get elected, then I won’t be able to do what I want because people will expect me to do something else.’ As Bell was leaving after this unusual interview, Margaret Thatcher asked him: ‘What’s your favourite poem?’
‘ “If”, by Rudyard Kipling’.
‘Mine, too’, she replied.
From day one, she and Bell bonded.9
It was still unusual in the 1970s for political parties to rely on advertising men, although the Tories had used Colman Prentis and Varley in the 1959 election. But Margaret Thatcher took an intuitive decision to use the industry’s most innovative tactics and to trust Tim Bell. He suggested a strategy that consisted of appealing to voters’ instincts with emotional messages and hitting Labour hard by going on the attack. Both themes were present in the poster he unveiled to the Leader of the Opposition that Sunday afternoon at Scotney.
The poster, destined to become a political legend, showed a dole queue tailing off into the distance. The slogan above it read ‘Labour isn’t working’. Bell told her it was a double entendre. ‘What’s this double entendre that’s too subtle for me to get?’ she demanded. It was patiently explained to her that neither the Labour government nor the unemployed were working. Then she found a different objection. ‘Surely, it’s all wrong that the biggest thing on this poster is the name of the opposition? Why are we promoting them?’ Tim Bell argued back: ‘We’re not promoting the opposition. We are demolishing Labour.’10 Eventually she saw the point, and gave the go-ahead. Although the poster went up on only twenty sites around the country, it caused a sensation.
Small news often becomes big news in sleepy August. With election jitters in the air, Labour launched a frenzy of protests against the poster, which only served to heighten its impact. The images were reproduced so often on television and in the press that Tim Bell later boasted that the Tories received £5 million of free publicity at a cash cost of only £50,000. Even the disclosure that the poster dole queue consisted of Hendon Young Conservatives posing for Saatchi and Saatchi cameras did not dilute its message. For the campaign reminded millions that the fear of rising unemployment was an issue on which the Labour government was electorally vulnerable.
No one took this reminder more seriously than Jim Callaghan. Having raised expectations that he would call an election, even to the point of singing the old music-hall song ‘There was I, waiting at the church …’ to the TUC conference on 5 September, he changed his mind. Two days later, he announced he would address the nation on television. ‘I don’t imagine that he’s making a ministerial broadcast to say he’s not going to hold an election’, said Margaret Thatcher, who was on a tour of marginal seats in the West Midlands.11 Minutes later she took a call from No. 10 Downing Street giving her advance notice that this was precisely what was going to happen. The Prime Minister had blinked. That evening he solemnly announced to the nation that there would be no autumn election.
It is one of the mysteries of twentieth-century politics why Jim Callaghan backed away from going to the country. One explanation was that the Saatchi and Saatchi poster unnerved him. A second was that he felt less sure than the pollsters and most other observers that he would win the electorate’s support. A third was that he thought he could gamble on an improvement in the economy over the winter months, winning the co-operation of the unions for a policy of pay restraint. But the most private, and perhaps most telling, explanation was the one he gave to his Downing Street aide, Tom McNally. ‘In the history books, having been Prime Minister for three years rather than two looks a lot better.’ When this unguarded Callaghan aside was passed on to Bernard Donoughue, the head of the Prime Minister’s Policy Unit at No. 10, he observed: ‘That’s the ring of the true Jim.’ Callaghan’s desire to record against his name ‘Prime Minister 1976–1979’ was the decisive factor in postponing the date of polling day.12
When she received the news of the delay, Margaret Thatcher initially felt frustrated. She rang up Tim Bell to grumble about her sense of anti-climax, but
soon shifted gear to discussing how the extra time could best be used. ‘We were all on the go button,’ he recalled, ‘but once she began saying in a matter of fact way that we would just have to start all over again, we knuckled down and began preparing a completely new set of party political broadcasts for the New Year.’13
PPBs, as they were known, were considered to be a major force in shifting the allegiances of voters in the 1970s. The Tories were allocated five of them, each ten minutes long, during the election campaign itself, and two more in the weeks before polling day was announced. The ‘laughing boys’ seized these opportunities with relish. But their first priority was to extract the best possible performances from the leader.
Tim Bell recalled:
We treated her like a film star from the word go. She could have been Sophia Loren in terms of flowers, hairdos and compliments. Mind you, she saw through it. One day we were filming a PPB that was designed to reassure people that it would be all right to have a woman’s finger on the nuclear trigger. As she couldn’t understand what the fuss was about, it wasn’t easy to get her into the right mood for the filming. But Ronnie Millar had written a script which contained the line, ‘Whether we like it or not, we are the parents and the children of the nuclear generation’. He rehearsed her over and over again to get her intonation right. Eventually she said rather crossly, ‘The trouble with you lot is that you think I’m Anna Neagle’.†14
‘You lot’ delivered the goods for Margaret Thatcher and the Conservative Party because she came to trust them completely. All three of them were in love with her politically and to some extent personally. Ronnie Millar’s finest hours as her in-house wordsmith, or ‘Ronniefier’ of her speeches, came in her early years as Prime Minister, but he was effective in opposition, too. He got upset when some of his best efforts were discarded by her saying ‘It’s not me, dear’, but she learned to let him down gently, explaining to other members of her team, ‘Ronnie’s very sensitive, you know’.15
Gordon Reece and Tim Bell could not be categorised as sensitive plants, and her handling of them could be rougher. There was one explosive episode when both of them were fired for a serious transgression.
In the summer of 1978, Conservative Central Office received a letter from the BBC, asking if the Leader of the Opposition would participate in televised debates with the Prime Minister and the leader of the Liberal Party, during the election campaign. Reece and Bell thought this was a bad idea because their boss had most to lose in a contest with Callaghan. They also saw no merit in giving equality of airtime to the despised Liberals. So Gordon Reece wrote back to the BBC turning them down.
After receiving acceptances from Jim Callaghan and David Steel, the BBC tried again with a second letter, which puzzled Margaret Thatcher because Reece had not shown her the original correspondence. She asked him what had happened to the first letter. ‘Oh well, we answered it’, he said rather nervously. ‘You see, in image terms Callaghan’s a rather avuncular figure, and you can be a very hard fighter. So we thought it wouldn’t look nice on television for him to be seen getting beaten up by this …’
‘By this tough bitchy housewife’, snapped Margaret Thatcher.
‘Well, er, I wouldn’t put it quite like that …’, faltered Reece.
‘Let me understand something here’, said the Leader of the Opposition, with her voice rising to earthquake level eight on the Richter scale. ‘You got this letter from the BBC and you answered it without asking me. Get out! Get out, and take Tim with you! Get out!’
The two delinquents beat a hasty retreat from Flood Street, escorted to the door by a somewhat worse-for-wear Denis, who whispered, ‘She’ll be all right tomorrow’.16
His assurance gave little consolation to Reece and Bell. Shaken by the lady’s seismic wrath, they assumed their relationship with her had been terminated. So they spent the rest of the night drowning their sorrows.
The following morning, at seven-thirty, their respective hangovers were interrupted by calls from Caroline Stephens, who controlled the Leader of the Opposition’s diary: ‘Could you be at Flood Street by nine?’ When they presented themselves it was business as usual. Without a word of explanation, recrimination or apology, Margaret Thatcher never mentioned the BBC debates again.
Although television had counted in previous elections, by 1979 it was expected to be the dominant force in the coming contest. Margaret Thatcher was lucky to have three such consummate media professionals guiding her through the new age of animated PPBs and rolling electronic news bulletins. She relied on her experts completely. Her head told her she had to defer to them technically; her heart said she could trust them personally.
Tim Bell said:
I think it was because we understood the loneliness of her position as leader. Almost everyone political around her wanted something from her, or even wanted her to lose. We only wanted her to win. We understood her, almost loved her, as a woman – which helped. And all three of us were absolutely sound in our agreement with her convictions. We were pretty much the original ‘One of us’ group.17
What this group could not know as they re-scripted and re-shot all five of the election campaign PPBs in the autumn of 1978 was that events on the street were about to deliver a whole lot more of ‘us’ into Margaret Thatcher’s political corner.
THE WINTER OF DISCONTENT
The ‘winter of discontent’ was preceded by an autumn of division for the Tories. The Party Conference in October highlighted the split between Heathite and Thatcherite Conservatism. Predictably, the most troublesome issues were incomes policy and trade-union policy. On the first, Ted Heath spoke in support of the government’s 5 per cent pay norm, while Margaret Thatcher was known to favour free collective bargaining. On the second, Jim Prior was in favour of a ‘softly, softly’ approach to trade-union reform, while his leader wanted to legislate for secret ballots before strike action, the withdrawal of benefits for strikers’ families and the outlawing of the closed shop. It was becoming increasingly difficult to paper over these cracks with a façade of shadow cabinet unity.
A third divisive issue was the renewal of sanctions on Rhodesia, which caused a row at the conference and the rebellion of 114 Tory MPs in an autumn vote in the House of Commons. These splits took their toll. Immediately after the conference season, Labour moved ahead by five and a half points in the opinion polls.18 On 26 October the Conservatives lost a by-election at Berwick and East Lothian that they were expected to win. In early November, Gallup reported that Margaret Thatcher’s personal approval had fallen to 33 per cent. When asked whether she or Ted Heath would make the better prime minister, a sample of voters polled by MORI for the Daily Express preferred Heath by a margin of 22 percentage points.19
As 1978 drew to a close, Margaret Thatcher’s tenure on the leadership of her party looked shaky. She had her loyalists, but there were nowhere near enough of them to make her secure. Several of the MPs who had voted for her in 1975 were growing uncertain in their support three and a half years later. A few had privately recanted. But Margaret Thatcher, who could at least be confident that there would be no leadership challenge to her position before the imminent election, ignored the negative atmosphere and exuded an artificial air of invincibility.
To Norman Tebbit, one member of the ‘Gang of Four’ who helped her prepare for Prime Minister’s Questions, she breezed: ‘How are you – not depressed? Good. We’ll beat the bastards yet.’ Even the ultra-loyal Tebbit was startled by her defiance. ‘She swore so rarely that I was taken aback’, he recalled. ‘But there was certainly an air of defeatism at that time.’20
Like Queen Victoria, Margaret Thatcher was not interested in the possibilities of defeat. Even so, December weekends at Scotney must have had uneasy moments. ‘We were behind in the polls and seemed all too willing to behave like a permanent Opposition’, she recalled. ‘We still had a long way to go.’21
Suddenly, there were unexpected pre- and post-Christmas developments on the industria
l front that changed the outlook. The government’s 5 per cent pay limit, which had been hanging together by the slenderest of gossamer threads, fell apart in December when the health-service unions and local authority workers rejected it with the announcement that they would strike in the New Year. In January the Transport and General Workers’ Union called the road-haulage drivers out in pursuit of an outrageous 25 per cent pay claim. The oil-tanker drivers followed suit. NHS manual workers (including refuse collectors, porters, cleaners and mortuary assistants) made up the next wave of strikers.
By the middle of January the country was in chaos. Lack of fuel deliveries meant power cuts at a time of extreme cold. Unable to have goods delivered in or out by road transport, many businesses shut down. Schools closed. Hospitals accepted only emergency cases. Scenes of violent picketing outside factories, docks and power plants shocked the nation’s television viewers. The worst symptoms of the unrest were the rotting piles of garbage on the streets and dead bodies being prevented from burial by pickets outside hospitals. The face of trade-union militancy had never looked uglier as the excesses spread towards anarchy.
On 22 January, the union leaders called out 1.5 million workers for a National Day of Action. It was the biggest stoppage since the General Strike of 1926. The government’s reaction to such events was one of impotence and incompetence.
Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality Page 28