In the middle of these upheavals Jim Callaghan attended a G7 Summit in Guadeloupe. It was bad PR for the Prime Minister to be televised in shirt sleeves, relaxing alongside Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, Helmut Schmidt and Jimmy Carter in the Caribbean sunshine while Britain shivered in the turmoil back home. But Callaghan made these images infinitely worse by his complacent underplaying of the chaos when he returned. ‘Crisis? What Crisis?’ was the headline of the Sun’s report on his press conference at Heathrow Airport.22
Although he did not use these actual words, the journalistic licence cunningly suggested to the Sun’s editor, Larry Lamb, by Tim Bell was a fair portrayal of the Prime Minister’s attempt to minimise the scale of the problem. Callaghan never fully recovered from this gaffe.
As the havoc surged to new heights, Margaret Thatcher’s natural instinct was to go for the government’s jugular. But a combination of her own caution and the restraining advice of her colleagues caused her to handle the drama more skilfully.
The great turning point in Margaret Thatcher’s relationship with the British electorate came with a party political broadcast on 17 January 1979. It was not the message she had planned to deliver. The PPB that had been filmed but rejected at the last minute was confrontational. The one that she actually gave was consensual. She took a lot of persuasion to take the second option.
‘You know what you’re doing, don’t you?’ she said to her three speech- writers, Ronnie Millar, Chris Patten and Tim Bell, who came in to see her with the new text, accompanied by Peter Thorneycroft, the Party Chairman. ‘You’re asking me to let Callaghan off the hook.’ ‘No,’ said Thorneycroft gently, ‘we’re asking you to put country before party.’23 This patriotic argument won her round. The filmed PPB was binned. In its place she gave a completely new speech, straight to camera from her room in the House of Commons.
‘Yes, technically, this is a Party Political Broadcast on behalf of the Conservative Party’, she opened, as these words in the formal title faded from the nation’s screens.
But tonight I don’t propose to use the time to make party political points. I do not think you would want me to do so. The crisis that our country faces is too serious for that. And it is our country, the whole nation, that faces this crisis, not just one party or even one government. This is no time to put party before country. I start from there.24
Having donned the mantle of a unifying national leader, Margaret Thatcher offered the opposition’s support for the government if they would legislate to introduce a ban on secondary picketing, the funding of strike ballots and no-strike agreements in essential services. She had made these proposals when speaking in the Commons on the previous day. The Prime Minister, in thrall to the unions who were the backers and backbone of the Labour Party, had brushed her cross-party deal aside. But as she repeated the offer on television, she seized the moral superiority of speaking for Britain.
The case is now surely overwhelming; there will be no solution to our difficulties which does not include some restriction on the power of the unions. And if that case is overwhelming, then in the national interest surely government and opposition should make common cause on this one issue.
She concluded with the punch-line, ‘We have to learn again to be one nation, or one day we shall be no nation’.25
It took time for Margaret Thatcher to realise what a resounding success this broadcast had been. One of the quickest and most surprisingly favourable reactions came from Jim Callaghan. The next day, as the Leader of the Opposition and the Prime Minister walked down the aisle of Westminster Abbey together after attending a memorial service, Callaghan said to her: ‘That was a damned good broadcast you did last night … I wish I’d said it. Well done.’26
Margaret Thatcher gave him a cool response, thinking she was being patronised. But within a few seconds she was getting the same message again. By chance I was standing close to her near the West Door of the Abbey. ‘Will you walk out with me?’ she asked. So I escorted her through the throng of photographers to her car, congratulating her on the broadcast, and telling her I had watched it at a South London pub in Kennington. ‘Everyone was quiet,’ I said, ‘and when you finished with that line about “one nation or no nation”, a lot of people at the bar clapped.’
‘Our people?’ she asked.
‘No, just ordinary working men in the pub.’
‘Well …’ she said. ‘That’s quite something, isn’t it?’27
Soon she was hearing similar assessments from many sources.
The ‘laughing boys’ were exultant. Tim Bell came to believe ‘this broadcast won the election’.28
It certainly swung the polls her way. Suddenly the Conservatives were nineteen points ahead of Labour, and Margaret Thatcher’s personal ratings leapt by fifteen points to 48 per cent.29 The ‘winter of discontent’ had transformed her from divisive voice to national leader in waiting. As the government’s woes multiplied, she prepared for the final push to victory.
THE VOTE OF NO CONFIDENCE
For a Leader of the Opposition whose job it was to defeat the incumbent government, Margaret Thatcher was surprisingly hesitant about delivering the coup de grâce. It was caution that made her hold back. Most of her back-benchers had no such reservations. I vividly remember the mood of angry impatience that surged through the 1922 Committee meetings during the ‘winter of discontent’. At one of them, Julian Amery echoed the call his father Leo Amery had made in the 1940 debate about Neville Chamberlain: ‘In the name of God, go!’30
Amery junior was the toast of the smoking room after that filial blast on the trumpet. But the leader herself was giving an uncertain sound. Her reasoning was, ‘We were extremely reluctant to put down a Motion of No Confidence until we were assured of its likely success’.31 It was not an argument that had much appeal to her rank and file MPs. During one boisterous late-night sitting in early March a group of us broke into ‘Why are we waiting?’ whenever a member of the shadow cabinet came anywhere near our part of the tea room. The Conservative Parliamentary Party was beginning to resemble those scenes of order, counter-order and disorder immortalised in Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome when:
Those behind cried ‘Forward!’
And those before cried ‘Back!’32
What was holding Margaret Thatcher back was her attempt to make sense of the grubby calculations on the changing parliamentary arithmetic. After the chaos of the ‘winter of discontent’, Labour was dealt another lethal blow by the collapse of its devolution policy. Referenda on the issue in Wales and Scotland on 1 March produced negative results. As a consequence it looked as though MPs from the nationalist parties would no longer be willing to prop up the government. The Liberals now wanted an early election following the breakdown of the Lib–Lab pact. These underminings of the tenuous allegiances that had allowed Labour to survive for the past few months meant that the government no longer had the votes to keep on getting its business though in the House of Commons.
The absence of a majority did not, however, ensure that Labour could be dislodged. All depended on the twelve Northern Ireland MPs who were split in at least three different directions. Margaret Thatcher declared herself implacably opposed to doing deals with any of these factions that might tie her hands as Prime Minister. Nevertheless her Shadow Northern Ireland Secretary, Airey Neave, did secretly put out feelers to the ten United Ulster Unionists. However, since this party was far from united, not unanimously unionist and not entirely drawn from Ulster (Enoch Powell having become one of its MPs), the outcome of Neave’s horse trading was shrouded in swirling Irish mists.
By the third week in March, the clamour from the back benches became irresistible. Even though the arithmetic of predicted voting did not clearly add up in her methodical mind to the desired figure, and even though she feared that a failed result would prolong the life of the Labour government until the autumn, Margaret Thatcher reluctantly took the plunge and tabled the opposition motion: ‘This House has no confidence in H
er Majesty’s Government.’33
The no confidence debate produced the most exciting parliamentary night in living memory. As one of the youngest MPs, I sat throughout the 1974–1979 session on the third bench below the gangway which junior Tories had to share with the United Ulster Unionists. On 28 March this gave me one of the best seats in the House for witnessing the extraordinary gyrations of the Northern Ireland MPs who eventually decided the outcome of the motion.
Margaret Thatcher opened the debate with one of the more pedestrian speeches of her career. For once it did not matter. There was so much electricity in the chamber that a low-voltage performance by the Leader of the Opposition seemed almost irrelevant. Her twenty-nine-minute analysis of why the British economy had been in decline for the past five years was heard in bored silence. Only her final lines got a cheer:
What condemns the Prime Minister now is the justified feeling that the substance of matters before the House takes second place to the survival of the Government. That feeling is widespread, and it robs the Government and the Prime Minister of authority, credibility and dignity.34
Despite his tattered authority, for the sixth time in their past two years of major parliamentary clashes, the Prime Minister outshone the Leader of the Opposition. Jim Callaghan was on chipper form, teasing Margaret Thatcher for hanging back from tabling her no confidence motion until after she had discovered that the Liberals and the Scottish Nationalists would be voting for it. ‘She found the courage of their convictions.’35
But this was a day when votes, not words, counted. On the Ulster Unionist bench there was much whispering and manoeuvring as the evening wore on. It was clear that Enoch Powell was doing his utmost to persuade his colleagues to abstain. The Reverend Ian Paisley, my next-door neighbour on the bench, shifted his not inconsiderable bulk upwards, downwards and sideways with such animation during these sotto voce arguments that I was bounced around on the same strip of taut green leather bench like a tennis ball.
Much of the debate was taken up with speeches from Members representing outlying reaches of the United Kingdom with constituencies like the Western Isles, Carmarthen, Renfrewshire, Antrim South, Caernarvon and Down North. During one of these orations I muttered that the speaker was as ‘wet as hell’, only to be chided by the Reverend Paisley with the reproach, ‘Hell is not wet!’36
Satanic or at least sinister rumours were circulating in the bars and corridors of the Palace of Westminster all day long. One was that Labour’s terminally ill MP for Batley and Morley, Sir Alfred Broughton, had been brought down from his deathbed in Yorkshire, but had died on the journey. However, once his ambulance was sighted in Palace Yard, it was claimed his vote could still be ‘nodded through’ (the procedure for allowing sick members of the precincts to be counted in divisions), even if he was dead. This would have been taking to extreme the convention that no one legally dies within the precincts of Parliament.
Like several of the hysterical stories ground out by the rumour mill in the closing hours of the debate, this one was nonsense. Jim Callaghan and his Chief Whip had already decided that it would be morally wrong to subject the dying Broughton to a 400-mile round trip down the M1 and back. So neither his ambulance nor his vote existed.
Great anger was caused to Margaret Thatcher in the middle of these tensions when the opposition’s Deputy Chief Whip, Bernard ‘Jack’ Weatherill, offered to pair with Broughton. He was attempting to honour a previous pledge that pairs would always be granted to seriously ill Members on either side. But the government’s Deputy Chief Whip, Walter Harrison, refused the offer for equally honourable reasons.‡ So there was no change in the numbers, although there was a change for the worse in Thatcher–Weatherill relations, as later events were to show.
Even without Sir Alfred Broughton, the experts calculated that Labour would win because they could count on the support of two anti-Unionist MPs from Northern Ireland. They were Gerry Fitt, the leader of the Social Democratic Labour Party, and Frank Maguire, a Republican with no love for the Tory government that had interned him for three years under the Special Powers Act.
As MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone, Maguire was known only for his absence and silence. In the five years since being elected, he had not made his maiden speech. However, when he arrived in the Palace of Westminster, apparently to cast his vote for the government, the Ulster Unionists on the bench beside me worked themselves into a frenzy of excitement. ‘Beelzebub is here!’ declared Robert Bradford, ‘Labour will be home and dry now!’ This became the received arithmetical wisdom in many quarters after the sighting of the maverick Mr Maguire was confirmed.
A devilish feud between Gerry Fitt and Frank Maguire was to send the arithmetic astray at the last moment. But no one understood this at the time. Instead, the rumours multiplied while both the climatic and the political temperature climbed.
The House of Commons was a hellish place on the night of 28 March. Not only was the chamber as packed and hot as Dante’s Inferno, almost everyone was hungry. The ‘winter of discontent’ had spread to the catering department whose employees walked out on strike on the busiest night for years. Fearing that vital votes could get lost if MPs went in search of outside nourishment, the Conservative and Labour whips banned all their members from leaving the building. This left most of us with empty stomachs, although Margaret Thatcher dined comfortably on a food hamper sent in from Fortnum and Mason.
The wind-up of the debate was both passionate and hilarious thanks largely to Michael Foot, who teased the leaders of the Scottish Nationalist Party (Donald Stewart) and the Liberal Party (David Steel). Foot accused Margaret Thatcher of leading ‘her troops into battle snugly concealed behind a Scottish Nationalist shield, with the boy David holding her hand’.37 She was about the only MP present who did not laugh. Her po-face may have been due to her failure to understand the joke or to her expectation that the motion would be narrowly defeated.
The aye lobby for the big division was excitable to the point of near hysteria, but not in the bubble around Margaret Thatcher. Her Chief Whip Humphrey Atkins gave her bad news. Labour had polled at full strength, boosted by the votes of Frank Maguire and Gerry Fitt. A couple of Tories had broken the ban on going out to dinner and had not returned from White’s Club. Labour would hang on by a two- or three-vote majority reported the deeply apologetic Atkins.
Sitting on the front bench awaiting the announcement of the voting figures, the Leader of the Opposition cut a dejected figure. Suddenly there was a whisper passed along by members of the shadow cabinet bench that made her sit up. It was a report from her PPS that the vote was tied. Seconds later there was a thumbs-up sign from Tony Berry, the Conservative whip who had been counting the Labour votes in the no lobby.
There was a moment of disbelief followed by an exultant roar from the Tory benches. Humphrey Atkins reversed his pessimism, shouting to his boss, somewhat superfluously by that stage: ‘We’ve won!’
In the final tally, Labour had one MP too ill to vote (Broughton). The two missing Tories, one of them Winston Churchill, Sir Winston’s grandson, returned from White’s in the nick of time, while the two feuding Irishmen killed the Labour government they supported by actions of complete illogicality. At the last moment, Frank Maguire said he had ‘come over the water to abstain in person’,38 and did just that. Gerry Fitt announced that he could not vote to keep the Labour government in office, although he would campaign vigorously to get it re-elected. As a result of these illogical declarations, the government lost two vital votes.
The result was announced in a stentorian bellow by the 6ft 7in former Guards officer turned Tory whip, Spencer Le Marchant: ‘The Ayes to the right 311. The Noes to the left 310. So the Ayes have it.’ Pandemonium in excelsis! The government had fallen.
It was the first time a vote of confidence had been lost in the House of Commons since the defeat of Ramsay MacDonald’s first Labour government in 1924. We back-bench Tories celebrated well into the small hours. More circumspec
tly, Margaret Thatcher had a quick glass of wine in the whips’ office before leaving for Flood Street under increased police protection, telling her family assembled there, ‘I’ve got a lot of work to do now’.39
It was a parliamentary night to remember.
REFLECTION
The ‘winter of discontent’ broke the mould of British politics. Before it, Margaret Thatcher was a doubtful bet to become the next prime minister. Once it lurched out of control, she was a certainty.
Her conviction that the unions had to be defeated was never explicitly spelt out on the last lap of the election. Yet somehow she communicated to the public that she would be strong enough to rise to the challenge. The force of her personality sent out this message. The voters were far from sure that they liked her, but they sensed that they needed her. There was a growing feeling that Labour had become too tired as a government to handle the union militants. The time had come for a strict headmistress who would impose national discipline and restore order.
Margaret Thatcher grew in public stature and private confidence as her views were vindicated by events. Even so, she still had to win the battle to establish her credentials for leading a new government to the electorate. It was interesting that she chose as her right-hand men for this task a trio of anti-establishment mavericks, who were complete outsiders from the political class. ‘You know why we get on so well with the old bat?’ Tim Bell rhetorically asked a friend. ‘None of us want to be politicians.’40
It was one of the paradoxes of Margaret Thatcher, herself a totally professional careerist in politics, that she had a poor opinion of most other professional politicians. They were accustomed to hedging their bets, trimming their sails and seeking the common ground of consensus. She despised all three of these practices. She wanted complete commitment and was unafraid of confrontation. So she looked around for fellow warriors, or at least fellow challengers of the accepted wisdom. She ran her party in the last months before the election rather in the way that she came to run her government. She rummaged around in the pool of talent available to her until she found abilities she admired, combined with a zeal that matched her own instincts. This was an unorthodox, almost revolutionary, form of leadership for the Tory Party, but the times were so serious that she got away with it.
Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality Page 29