There is no doubt that the arrival of Margaret Thatcher, the newly elected MP for Finchley, in the House of Commons in 1959 made an electrifying impact. After all the difficulties she had had to get selected as a woman, once she was elected, she enjoyed an enormous amount of attention from the press and media because she was a woman.
Jill Knight remembers:
From the very start, she had steadily built up an enviable reputation among colleagues from all parties. Her maiden speech was unique, for she used it to introduce her own Private Member’s Bill. She was able to do this because she had gained a top place in the annual ballot for Private Members’ Bills, What made her speech doubly memorable was that she went from start to finish without a note.
She was constantly reported in the Evening Standard, doing radio and television interviews, being asked about her clothes, her home, her children, her views on anything and everything. One can only imagine how her fellow male colleagues felt about it all. But her charisma was undoubted. The brown girl of the Oxford days had gone, and in her place was a woman whose presence made itself felt as soon she walked onto a platform or into a room. She was full of fervour and passion. Politics had turned her on.
Everyone who has worked with Margaret Thatcher knows how much she relished the challenge and excitement of elections, the long days packed with activity and change, the hourly need for decisions, great or small, and the thrill of campaigning out on the street. There was not a moment to be wasted, she would note with satisfaction, urging everyone, ‘Let’s get on with it.’
Jean Lucas was a Conservative Party agent, eventually becoming Chairman of the National Society of Agents in 1980. She has kept a record of some of the events in her long and successful professional life, including the by-election in 1975 that saw the Conservative Peter Bottomley elected in West Woolwich. She believes that ‘Margaret Thatcher was the first leader to see it as her job to support candidates in by-elections.’
Virginia Bottomley, Peter’s wife, also has memories of that by-election and the electrifying part played in it by Mrs Thatcher.
My first encounter with Margaret Thatcher was in 1975 as the dutiful wife of the by-election candidate in West Woolwich. Peter had fought the seat on two previous occasions in 1974. The MP, Bill Hamling, died. Peter had hung on assisting the constituency in the aftermath of the two defeats. Suddenly he found himself fighting the first by-election since Margaret Thatcher’s election as party leader. Her arrival in the constituency was full of anxiety and excitement. I walked with her round the streets as a 27-year-old ingénue. She was formidable, intimidating and impressive. The Conservatives, Peter, and Margaret won the by-election.
Sarah Joiner describes Mrs Thatcher’s first campaign as leader of the Conservative Party in 1979. She gives a vivid picture of the details of a political campaign and of the powerful leadership given by Mrs Thatcher to every aspect of it.
I was appointed as personal assistant to Roger Boaden, the European Elections Officer at Conservative Central Office (CCO) in February 1979. I was just nineteen. We were co-ordinating the national activities of the candidates for the first direct elections to the European Parliament. A few weeks after we started working together, Roger came back from a meeting to announce that the general election had been called, and that he was to be the organiser of the leader’s election campaign tour. This was because he had previously organised campaign tours for Ted Heath. We gained a deputy for Roger B., another Roger – Roger Pratt, and a second secretary, Jane Pitcher.
It was our job to coordinate every aspect of getting Mrs T. and her entourage around the UK to meet party members and the public, minute by minute during the campaign.
While Mrs T.’s speechwriters and policymakers were in different parts of CCO, we inhabited an eyrie at the top of Smith Square painted in screaming yellow. We also adopted the trio of police officers assigned to Mrs. T.’s personal protection into our already cramped space during the times they were in the building with her. It was unnerving to see their holster guns when they took their jackets off, but you got used to it quite quickly.
Most of my time was spent typing endless sheets of detailed programme notes and checking detail. It was all highly confidential and every copy was numbered and issued only to those on the ‘need to know’ list. The information literally tracked Mrs T. every minute of the day. I clearly remember typing things like:
‘08.01 Door opens at Flood Street’
‘08.03 Mrs Thatcher in car, moves off towards…’
We detailed every handover from police force to police force along motorways and at county borders, we scheduled hair appointments, dress fittings, meal breaks, hotel arrangements, the names of key ‘meeters and greeters’; everything was listed on the sheets.
On many occasions Mrs T. would come to sit with us in our yellow offices. She usually came on her own or with only one or two others. She was always cheerful and professional, in that wonderful ‘head girl’ way, jollying us along when we were about to collapse. Such energy made us determined to keep up. I remember her perching on my desk one evening explaining to me that yellow was just the colour to keep us all awake and motivated. Pale green, she declared, was quite hopeless as it dulled the senses. When I was typing yet more amendments to a speech, she made me a cup of tea.
I remember Roger B. being cross when we had to change the official cars used to transport Mrs T. The reason was because the car boots were not big enough to lay her dresses out flat inside, to keep them in pristine order. Roger B. went off muttering furiously that this had to be a ‘woman thing’, as all previous leaders, who of course had been men, just put their suit bag in the boot without a fuss.
During the campaign Mrs T. acquired a coach nicknamed the battle bus, all decked out in party colours. On the day of its delivery to Smith Square, the press were invited to see it in action. As Mrs T. sat on the seat dictating a note to Jane, I bashed away at a typewriter set up on the table between us. The bus slowly circled the square as photographers snapped away.
I was formally introduced much later to Mrs T. at a national rally, and she knew without prompting who I was and what I did. She asked after my parents, Trixie and Kevin Gardner, and if we still had our home in north Cornwall. I was impressed because she always thanked her backroom boys and girls.
Sarah Joiner added in conversation that Mrs Thatcher always packed the sleeves of her dresses and jackets with tissue paper. ‘It keeps them in shape, you see. I always do it, and you should, too.’
Harvey Thomas has other memories of the organisation involved in this election campaign.
All of us who worked on the ‘advance party’ for Mrs T.’s visits and travel were dedicated to protecting her and projecting her. Sometimes we had to move quickly to stop others taking advantage. On a visit to Alton Towers, we had worked through a very careful route and plan for the whole visit. The Special Branch were of course with us, and everything had been approved for her personal wellbeing, for the political presentation and for security. It was only when I was walking alongside her and the hosts, and realised we were edging in the wrong direction that I quickly spoke to the boss and pointed this out. He said, ‘We thought we would take her on the big roller coaster.’ I grabbed a Special Branch colleague and together we made it clear that that was not part of the plan, and in the space of twenty to thirty yards we had reverted to the right route. She would have done whatever we arranged, but it would have been very uncomfortable not to say embarrassing for her to be put on a roller coaster, half the time upside down.
I think it was the sense of duty that actually helped her to deal with many situations by just getting on with it. In the 1979 election, during my very early time with her, we were on an election visit to a farm near Ipswich. Before any of us could do anything, the farmer had thrust a baby calf into her arms. Looking back at the video of the occasion, her face takes on a determined look and instinctively she turned to the cameras and said, ‘Don’t expect me to hold this for twenty minu
tes while you take pictures.’
Michael Brunson in A Ringside Seat sets this occasion in context.
It was clear that this style of campaigning with its heavy emphasis on the photo-opportunity would be used in the election. Our two travelling cameramen never lacked for a picture. The Leader of the Conservative Party tasted chocolates in Birmingham, butter in Aberdeen, and tea without milk or sugar at a tea factory in Newcastle. She had wires stuck all over her as her heart was checked in Milton Keynes and she waved two shopping bags around in Halifax, to show, she said, how much a pound had bought under the Tories six years earlier, and how much less it was now buying under Labour. Most famously of all, she cuddled a calf in a field near Ipswich. It was that last incident which came to symbolise the whole new approach to campaigning. It was all meant to tie in with whatever the theme of the day was supposed to be, presumably something to do with agriculture. But the whole operation seemed so outrageously over the top that it produced plenty of criticism that it was simply a picture for the sake of the picture alone … Mrs Thatcher not only posed but also began to answer questions with the young animal still clasped to her bosom. In my commentary later, I described the event, with considerable understatement and with not a little irony, as probably the first time that a major British politician had ever conducted a news conference in the middle of a field, while holding a farm animal. So agitated did Denis Thatcher become that he was heard to remark, ‘If we’re not careful, we’ll have a dead calf on our hands.’ Indeed, for several days afterwards, I and several others of the travelling reporters made regular enquiries about the calf’s health, in the hope of an even more spectacular dénouement to the whole business, but it was not to be. The calf, in the true spirit of Thatcherism, survived.
It is interesting to read Michael Brunson’s slightly disapproving account of a national figure making such play with photo opportunities in a general election campaign. But Mrs Thatcher and her advisers were in the vanguard of presentational change for political figures. By the time I fought my first parliamentary election in 1987, everyone was doing it. The advice from Conservative Central Office by then was: ‘One image is worth a thousand words.’
The 1979 election campaign, which put Mrs Thatcher into No. 10, culminated in another innovation: the first big public election rally at the Wembley Conference Centre. Harvey Thomas describes what happened.
The chairman of the Conservative Party, Lord Thorneycroft, a great man, had, with other party hierarchy figures, decreed that we could not use the song ‘Hello Maggie’ (to the tune of ‘Hello Dolly’) at the Wembley rally because it would be infra dig for the woman who was going to become Prime Minister. We had a fantastic warm-up with many stars well known at the time, and Lulu had been prepared to lead the audience in singing the song ‘Hello Maggie’. However, as instructed, I deleted it from the scheduled programme.
But then Mrs Thatcher was announced and began a walk to the platform and there was another of those split seconds in time when there is total silence and someone yelled out, ‘What about the song?’
The time was right. I was standing behind Lulu on the platform, touched her shoulder and said, ‘Go.’ Another friend, Pete Bye, was sitting at the organ, his eyes professionally glued on me and, as I pointed my finger at him, he struck the first chord of ‘Hello Maggie’. What followed, forgive the cliché, is history. The audience sang their hearts out, Mrs T. was almost in tears and people cheered and cheered. It was after that rally, while we were still in the conference centre, that Mrs T. asked me if I would stay on working with her in the whole field of presentation.
Margaret Thatcher loved campaigning, and was at her most energetic dynamic self when she was on the campaign trail. Even so, she was determined to adopt the most professional approach possible to campaigning, and in 1980 sent Harvey and Marlies Thomas to see what the Republicans were doing in the United States.
In 1980, when Ronald Reagan was running for the Republican nomination for President of the United States, Marlies and I were sent over to study the election campaigning techniques in America to see if there was anything that might be adapted for British use. In Victorville, in the Mojave Desert in California, we were introduced to Ronald Reagan, and the three of us sat on a bale of hay backstage, while Roy Rogers and Dale Evans sang to a 10,000 crowd outside on the stage.
Harvey Thomas points out that, on the subject of presentation, Margaret Thatcher expected and accepted professional advice, based, no doubt, on some of the experience he had gleaned in the US. No effort was too great. No detail was too small.
A significant mistake by Neil Kinnock’s advisers and the infamous Sheffield Rally in 1992 (at which it was said Kinnock lost that election), was to allow him to make a triumphal entrance walking through the whole length of the arena in Sheffield, so that by the time he reached the platform his mind was on everything but the content of his speech. With Mrs Thatcher, in contrast, we always made sure she had the shortest possible distance from backstage to the lectern, so that her mind could totally concentrate on the content and message she wanted to project.
To help, I would rig a couple of bright 800-watt television lights backstage and for three or four minutes before she went on, she would be looking directly into these lights, so that when she appeared in front of all the television lights on stage, she no longer had to squint. If there was a guest or friend backstage, she would comment to them, ‘Harvey likes to blind me before I go on, you know!’
When I introduced the idea to her in the 1983 election, she accepted it immediately and took it for granted that it would help her to be ready for the TV lights on stage.
Introducing the autocue was not quite so straightforward, at least until she saw how effectively Ronald Reagan used it when he spoke to both Houses of Parliament on his visit to the UK. It was quite a major introduction to British speech-making at the time, and, once she agreed to try it, she asked if we could do at least three or four solid rehearsals before she used it for real. And that’s what we did. I think there were four separate occasions when we set up the autocue in Downing Street, using some of her old speeches, and she quickly understood its principles and began to use it efficiently.
She also understood the need for careful integration of every aspect of her presentation – not just herself and her speech, and the way she dressed, but positioning the teleprompter screens, lighting and backlighting, positions of cameras, adequate space on the lectern, and microphone at the right height.
In 1985, at the Capitol in Washington, Mrs Thatcher was going to speak to the joint Houses of Congress. Setting things up beforehand, I had an argument with the then Speaker, Tip O’Neill, about whether we could have Mrs Thatcher’s favourite mineral water, Ashbourne, on the lectern when she spoke. He claimed it was commercial but common sense won the day, and I had the bottle of Ashbourne on the lectern in good time. After the speech, Tip O’Neill asked the Prime Minister whether she really did like her Ashbourne water as much as I had said. She replied, ‘When I see that Ashbourne bottle on the lectern, I know that everything is ready, that the lighting, microphones and teleprompter will all have been properly arranged. That gives me the confidence to focus on the speech.’
I remember when the proceedings of the House of Commons were first televised, in the autumn of 1989. We ministers were all offered training, perfunctory in the extreme, and which in my case made no difference at all, although most would agree that after a short time, we all forgot the cameras were there. Margaret Thatcher, however, predictably took the innovation very seriously, and was said to have had many rehearsals in the Chamber at the dead of night. The result was that the television news almost always carried sound-bites of Prime Minister’s Questions, with her in devastating form.
Despite all this care and attention lavished on the visual media, the written press was still vitally important to politicians at this time. Most Prime Ministers and Cabinet ministers made a point of being in regular contact with key journalists and editors, and
were on first-name terms with them. Mrs Thatcher had a less hands-on approach, although her attitude to the media during elections was different, like everything else.
Although Mrs Thatcher seldom saw political journalists at Westminster, Peter Riddell recalls how, during election campaigns, she was very accessible.
That was the era when the leaders of the main parties still saw the need to hold daily news conferences, then in and around Smith Square. She treated these events as seminars, as her daily chance to educate backward political journalists. Each political editor was given his – and it was still largely his rather than her – chance to ask a daily question. Even if the question was addressed to some other minister, she invariably intervened. While the broadcasters sat at the front to catch the cameras, some of us preferred to sit at the back in the crowded room used for press conferences. This was to allow us to hear the comments of Denis Thatcher, who stood at the back with some Conservative Central Office stalwarts. He offered an audible running commentary – ‘bloody silly question’, ‘a leftie’ etc. It was the world of Private Eye’s ‘Dear Bill’ letters made flesh.
One day during the 1987 election, I had stayed behind after the Labour Party news conference to raise a point with Neil Kinnock at what is now Local Government House in Smith Square, just across the road from the then Conservative Central Office. When I got over to Central Office, the small news conference room was full, so I watched proceedings on one of the television monitors in the foyer outside, knowing that a couple of my colleagues from the Financial Times were inside. I was standing there when the press conference finished and Mrs Thatcher came out, accompanied by Norman Tebbit, the party chairman. (No one ever called him the Chair.) She walked up to me and said, in the dismissive tone of the schoolmaster chiding a naughty pupil for not having done his homework, ‘You didn’t ask your usual question today, Mr Riddell.’ I stumbled out with my explanation about following up some point with the Labour leader. She questioned me about this, and then said, ‘You’ll want to know what happened here, then.’ She then gave a summary of what had happened at the Conservative press conference, much to the amusement of Norman Tebbit standing behind her. The truant had to be instructed – a strange but characteristic use of prime ministerial time.
The Real Iron Lady Page 12