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.
That said, I was saddened that we had had to give all these assurances. It is my passionate belief that what above all has gone wrong with British education is that since the war we have ‘strangled the middle way’. Direct grant schools and grammar schools provided the means for people like me to get on equal terms with those who came from well-off backgrounds. I would have liked grant-maintained schools – combined with the other changes we were making – to move us back to that ‘middle way’. I also wanted a return to selection – not of the old eleven-plus kind but a development of specialization and competition so that some schools would become centres of excellence in music, others in technology, others in science, others in the arts etc. This would have given specially gifted children the chance to develop their talents, regardless of their background.
At Monday’s press conference we took the economy as the subject of the day and Nigel Lawson made the opening statement. This was a good campaign for Nigel. Not only did he demonstrate complete command of the issues, he also spotted the implications of Labour’s tax and national insurance proposals – especially their planned abolition of the married man’s tax allowance and of the upper limit on employees’ national insurance contributions – for people on quite modest incomes. This threw Labour into total disarray in the last week of the campaign and revealed that they did not understand their own policies. Nigel had earlier published costings of the Labour Party’s manifesto at some £35 billion over and above the Government’s spending plans. As I was to say later in a speech: ‘Nigel’s favourite bedside reading is Labour policy documents: he likes a good mystery.’
At this stage, however, defence continued to dominate the headlines, mainly because of Neil Kinnock’s extraordinary gaffe in a television interview in which he suggested that Labour’s response to armed aggression would be to take to the hills for guerrilla warfare. We gleefully leapt upon this and it provided the inspiration for the only good advertisement of our campaign, depicting ‘Labour’s Policy on Arms’ with a British soldier, his hands held up in surrender. On Tuesday evening, after a day’s campaigning in Wales, I told a big rally in Cardiff:
Labour’s non-nuclear defence policy is in fact a policy for defeat, surrender, occupation, and finally, prolonged guerrilla fighting … I do not understand how anyone who aspires to government can treat the defence of our country so lightly.
Wednesday’s press conference was of particular importance to the campaign because we took education as the theme, with Ken Baker and me together, in order to allay the doubts our early confusion had generated and to regain the initiative on the subject, which I regarded as central to our manifesto. It went well.
But my tours, by general agreement, did not. Neil Kinnock was gaining more and better television coverage. He was portrayed – as I had specifically requested at the beginning of the campaign that I should be – against the background of cheering crowds, or doing something which fitted in with the theme of the day. The media were entranced by the highly polished Party Election Broadcast showing Neil and Glenys walking hand in hand, bathed in a warm glow of summer sunlight, to strains of patriotic music, looking rather like an advertisement for early retirement. This probably encouraged them to give favourable coverage to the Kinnock tours.
In spite of our difficulties the political situation was still favourable. Our lead in the polls was holding up. There had been a big erosion of support for the Alliance, whose campaign was marred by splits and that basic incoherence which is the nemesis of people who eschew principle in politics. Neil Kinnock kept away from the main London-based journalists and Bryan Gould took most of the press conferences. By the second week, however, this tactic was beginning to rebound. The Fleet Street press were able to cross-question me day after day and they expected to enjoy a similar sport with the Leader of the Opposition. In this they were enthusiastically encouraged by Norman Tebbit, who by temperament and talent was perfectly suited to maul Neil Kinnock and did so effectively in successive speeches as the campaign wore on.
That Thursday’s press conference was on the NHS. Norman Fowler had devised a splendid illustration of new hospitals built throughout Britain, marked by lights on a map which were lit up when he pressed a switch. Like the Kinnocks’ Election Broadcast, I had him repeat the performance by popular demand. But what was worrying me, as usual, was my speech that evening in Solihull.
We had worked on the draft late until 3.30 a.m. but I was still not happy with it. I continued to break away to work on it whenever I could during the day – that is when I was not meeting candidates, talking to regional editors, admiring Jaguars at the factory and then meeting crowds at the Home and Garden exhibition at the Birmingham NEC. As soon as we arrived at Dame Joan Seccombe’s house – she is one of the Party’s most committed volunteers – I left the others to enjoy her hospitality and closeted myself away with my speech writers, working frantically on the text right up to the last moment. For some mysterious reason the more you all suffer in preparing a speech, the better it turns out to be and this speech was very good indeed. It contained one wounding passage which drew a roar of approval from the audience:
Never before has the Labour Party offered the country a defence policy of such recklessness. It has talked of occupation – a defence policy of the white flag. During my time in government white flags have only once entered into our vocabulary. That was the night, when at the end of the Falklands War, I went to the House of Commons to report: ‘The white flags are flying over Port Stanley.’
And so to the final week. After voting myself, I spent the Thursday morning of June 11 and the early afternoon in Finchley visiting our Committee Rooms and then, as the time for getting late voters out to the poll approached, I returned to No. 10. Norman Tebbit came over and we had a long talk over drinks, not just about the campaign and the likely result, but also about Norman’s own plans. He had already told me that he intended to leave the Government after the election because he felt that he should spend more time with Margaret. There was not much I could say to try to persuade him otherwise, because his reasons were as personal as they were admirable. But I did bitterly regret his decision.
I had supper in the flat and listened to the television comment and speculation about the result. Before I left for Finchley at 10.30 p.m. I heard Vincent Hanna on the BBC forecasting a hung Parliament. ITV was talking about a Conservative majority of about 40. I felt reasonably confident that we would have a majority, but I was not at all confident how large it would be. My own result would be one of the later ones; but the first results began to come in just after 11 p.m. We held Torbay with a larger than predicted majority. Then we held Hyndburn, the second most marginal seat, then Cheltenham, a seat targeted by the Liberals, and then Basildon. At about 2.15 a.m. we had passed the winning post. My own majority was down by 400, though I secured a slightly higher percentage of the vote (53.9 per cent).
I was driven back into town, arriving at 2.45 a.m. at Conservative Central Office to celebrate the victory and thank those who had helped achieve it. Then I returned to Downing Street where I was met by my personal staff. I remember Denis saying to Stephen Sherbourne, as we went down the line: ‘You have done as much as anyone else to win the election. We could not have done it without you.’ Stephen may have been less pleased by my next remark. It was to ask him to come up to the study to begin work on making the next Cabinet. A new day had begun.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
An Improving Disposition
Reforms in education, housing and the Health Service
THE FIRST PRIORITY after the 1987 election victory was to see that I had the right team of ministers to implement the reforms set out in our manifesto. The reshuffle was a limited one: five Cabinet ministers left the Government, two at their own request. The general balance of the new Cabinet made it clear that ‘consolidation’ was no more my preferred option after the election than before it. John Biffen left the Cabinet: this was a loss in some ways, for he agreed with me about Europe and had sound instincts on economic matters too, but he had come to prefer commentary to collective responsibility. I lost Norman Tebbit for reasons I have explained. But Cecil Parkinson, a radical of my way of thinking, rejoined the Cabinet as Energy Secretary. I made no change at Education where Ken Baker would make up in presentational flair whatever he lacked in attention to detail, nor Environment where Nick Ridley was obviously the right man to implement the housing reforms which he had conceived. These two areas – schools and housing – were those in which we were proposing the most far-reaching changes. But it was not long before I decided that there must be a major reform of the National Health Service too. In John Moore, whom I had promoted to be Secretary of State for Health and Social Services, I had another radical, anxious to reform the ossified system he had inherited. So the Government soon found itself embarked on even more far-reaching social reforms than we had originally intended.
The starting point for the education reforms outlined in our general election manifesto was a deep dissatisfaction (which I fully shared) with Britain’s standard of education.
I had come to the conclusion that there had to be some consistency in the curriculum, at least in the core subjects. Alongside the national curriculum should be a nationally recognized and reliably monitored system of testing at various stages of the child’s school career, which would allow parents, teachers, local authorities and central government to know what was going right and wrong and take remedial action if necessary. The fact that since 1944 the only compulsory subject in the curriculum in Britain had been religious education reflected a healthy distrust of the state using central control of the syllabus as a means of propaganda. But that was hardly the risk now: the propaganda was coming from left-wing local authorities, teachers and pressure groups, not us. What I never believed, though, was that the state should try to regiment every detail of what happened in schools. Some people argued that the French centralized system worked: but such arrangements would not be acceptable in Britain. Here even the strictly limited objectives I set for the national curriculum were immediately seen by the vested interests in education as an opportunity to impose their own agenda.
The other possibility was to go much further in the direction of decentralization by giving power and choice to parents. Keith Joseph and I had always been attracted by the education voucher, which would give parents a fixed – perhaps means-tested – sum, so that they could shop around in the public and private sectors of education for the school which was best for their children. By means testing a voucher one could even reduce the ‘dead weight’ cost – that is the amount lost to the Exchequer in the form of subsidy for parents who would otherwise have sent their children to private schools anyway.
However, Keith Joseph recommended and I accepted that we could not bring in a straightforward education voucher scheme. In the event, we were, through our education reforms, able to realize the objectives of parental choice and educational variety in other ways. Through the assisted places scheme and the rights of parental choice of school under our 1980 Parents’ Charter we were moving some way towards this objective without mentioning the word ‘voucher’.
In the 1988 Education Reform Act we now made further strides in that direction. We introduced open enrolment – that is allowing popular schools to expand to their physical capacity. This significantly widened choice further and prevented local authorities setting arbitrary limits on good schools just to keep unsuccessful schools full. An essential element in the same reforms was per capita funding, which meant that state money followed the child to whatever school he attended. Parents would vote with their children’s feet and schools actually gained resources when they gained pupils. The worse schools in these circumstances would either have to improve or close. In effect we had gone as far as we could towards a ‘public sector voucher’. I would have liked to go further still and decided that we must work up a possible full-scale voucher scheme – I hinted at this in my final Party Conference speech – but did not have the time to take the idea further. It was Brian Griffiths who devised the extremely successful model of the ‘grant-maintained’ (GM) schools, which are free from local education authority (LEA) control entirely and are directly funded from the DES. With a healthy range of GM schools, City Technology Colleges, denominational schools and private schools (known as ‘public’ schools, much to the confusion of American visitors to Britain) parents would have a much wider choice. But, even more vital, the very fact of having all the important decisions taken at the level closest to parents and teachers, not by a distant and insensitive bureaucracy, would make for better education. This would be true of all schools, which was why we had introduced the Local Management of Schools Initiative (LMS) to give schools more control of their own budgets. But GM schools took it a giant step further.
The governors of a GM school were empowered to manage its budget (receiving their money directly without a service charge deducted by the LEA). They appointed the staff including the head teacher, agreed policy as regards admissions with the Secretary of State, decided the curriculum (subject to the core requirements) and owned the school and its assets. Th
e schools most likely to opt out of LEA control and become GM schools were those which had a distinctive identity, which wished to specialize in some particular subject or which wanted to escape from the clutches of some left-wing local authority keen to impose its own ideological priorities.
The vested interests working against the success of GM schools were strong. The DES, reluctant to endorse a reform that did not extend central control, would have liked to impose all manner of checks and controls on their operation. Local authority officials sometimes campaigned fiercely to prevent opting out by particular schools. And, unexpectedly, the churches also mounted an opposition. In the face of so much hostility I had the Grant-Maintained Schools Trust set up to publicize the GM scheme and advise those interested in making use of it. In fact, GM schools proved increasingly popular, not least with head teachers who were now, in consultation with the governors, able to set their own priorities.
The decentralizing features of our policy were extraordinarily successful. By contrast, the national curriculum – the most important centralizing measure – soon ran into difficulties. I wanted the DES to concentrate on establishing a basic syllabus for English, Mathematics and Science with simple tests to show what pupils knew. It always seemed to me that a small committee of good teachers ought to be able to pool their experience and write down a list of the topics and sources to be covered without too much difficulty. There ought then to be plenty of scope left for the individual teacher to concentrate with children on the particular aspects of the subject in which he or she felt a special enthusiasm or interest. I had no wish to put good teachers in a strait jacket. As for testing, I always recognized that no snapshot of a child’s, a class’s or a school’s performance on a particular day was going to tell the whole truth. But tests did provide an independent outside check on what was happening. Nor did it seem to me that the fact that some children would know more than others was something to be shied away from. The purpose of testing was not to measure merit but knowledge and the capacity to apply it. Unfortunately, my philosophy turned out to be different from that of those to whom Ken Baker entrusted the drawing up of the national curriculum and the formulation of the tests alongside it.
Margaret Thatcher: The Autobiography Page 74