The Path to Power m-2

by Margaret Thatcher

  The other tactical question concerned the morning press conferences. Gordon Reece would have liked to dispense with these altogether. In terms of media impact, he was right. Very rarely did anything which happened at the press conference — other perhaps than egregious slip-ups, which were thankfully absent during this campaign — make its way into the day’s main news. But the morning press conference does provide the press with opportunities to ask awkward questions, and this in turn provides an opportunity for politicians to show what they are made of. The morning press conferences are therefore an opportunity to win the respect of seasoned journalists whose judgement will influence the coverage they give throughout the campaign.

  A further complication on this occasion was that neither we nor the Labour Party were prepared to surrender the convenient 9.30 a.m. slot to the other. Consequently, our press conference in Central Office was held at the same time as Labour’s in Transport House across the square. A posse of journalists would arrive in the already overcrowded and overheated Central Office conference room to ask questions on the basis of allegations and attacks made by Jim Callaghan, Denis Healey or Shirley Williams at the beginning of the Labour press conference. A final element of chaos was contributed by the new ‘ENG’ (‘electronic news-gathering’) cameras. Though ridiculously unwieldy by present-day standards, they greatly increased the flexibility and extent of television coverage. But the number of cameramen also increased. And the shoulder-held television cameras with their trailing cables both at Central Office and at locations along the route of my tour were a constant threat to life and limb.

  For some reason, the Conservative Party always starts campaigning later and builds up more slowly than the Labour Party. Labour on this occasion, however, had an even freer run than usual between the Dissolution and the launch of our manifesto on Wednesday 11 April — largely because the political colleagues to whom I left the public appearances and statements were not very effective. This was, indeed, a difficulty throughout the campaign. With the exception of Michael Heseltine, always relishing a headline, they seemed to behave more like ministers-in-waiting than politicians — which meant, of course, that they risked waiting a good deal longer than they expected. It also ensured that even more of the focus was on me, which even I felt was a mixed blessing. In all campaigns there should ideally be a balance of tones and personalities.

  Labour used this period to some effect in order to begin attacking policies which we had not yet published. But the trade union leaders managed, before they were muzzled by Labour Party managers, to play into our hands by adopting tones reminiscent of the Winter of Discontent. Sid Weighell, leader of the National Union of Railwaymen, threatened that with free collective bargaining and a Conservative Government, he would ‘say to the lads, come on, get your snouts into the trough’. Bill Keays, leader of the print union SOGAT, promised ‘confrontation’ if the country was ‘foolish enough to elect the Tory Party’. David Basnett, leader of the General and Municipal Workers, also predicted industrial conflict. It was the same old tune which had played well for Labour in the past, but which was out of harmony with what voters were now prepared to tolerate.

  Nor had I been entirely silent. On Thursday 5 April I had addressed the candidates (including Conservative MPs standing for re-election) at a meeting at Central Hall, Westminster. This was not my — or probably anyone else’s — favourite place for a public meeting, since it was then rather drab and characterless. There was a special difficulty this year because the candidates expected to hear from me the main themes of a manifesto which was still unpublished. I had to give them some idea of what was coming without revealing the details. So I concentrated heavily on income tax cuts to give greater incentives for wealth-creation and on the need for trade union reform. An audience composed entirely of speakers is not the easiest to address. But their enthusiasm confirmed my instinct that we had chosen the right battleground.

  THE FIRST WEEK — D–21 to D–14

  On Wednesday 11 April the manifesto itself was launched at the first Conservative press conference which I chaired, joined by Willie Whitelaw, Keith Joseph, Geoffrey Howe, Peter Carrington, Jim Prior, Humphrey Atkins, Peter Thorneycroft and Angus Maude. The manifesto’s tone was modest and practical and Chris Patten and Angus Maude had dressed our ideas in language which was simple and jargon-free.[60]

  It went down well in the following day’s press. But the heat at the hugely overcrowded press conference itself was almost unbearable. And my perspiring male colleagues clad in their thick worsted suits suffered worse than I did.

  The following day was Maundy Thursday. Because Easter fell during the campaign, four days of electioneering were lost. So my first day of serious campaigning was on Monday 16 April — what in the election agents’ jargon was D–17. (‘D-day’ of course was polling day itself.) We had decided to begin in Wales. Having flown down from Gatwick, I met the election battle bus at Swansea Airport, visited an NHS hospital and went on to the local Conservative Club, where I was to give regional television and radio interviews. I was aware of a fair amount of background noise at the club. But I only learned afterwards that a huge row, which finished up with fisticuffs, had arisen when the club authorities had tried to keep women reporters out of those rooms reserved for male members only.

  Then I went on to Cardiff for the first of the major rallies of the campaign. It was an appropriate place to start. This was very much the heart of enemy territory since Mr Callaghan’s constituency was Cardiff South East. So it was a good thing that Cardiff City Hall had a pleasant feel, the right acoustics and an enthusiastic audience. I also had an extremely powerful speech to deliver. It was an uncompromising statement of how socialism had debilitated Britain and of the need for a fundamental change of direction — though not towards some experiment with Utopia but rather back to principles from which we had mistakenly departed.

  …In politics, I’ve learned something you in Wales are born knowing: if you’ve got a message, preach it. I am a conviction politician. The Old Testament prophets didn’t merely say: ‘Brothers, I want consensus.’ They said: ‘This is my faith and vision. This is what I passionately believe. If you believe it too, then come with me.’ Tonight I say to you just that. Away with the recent bleak and dismal past. Away with defeatism. Under the twin banners, choice and freedom, a new and exciting future beckons the British people.

  The audience loved it and so did I. But my cunning adversary, Jim Callaghan, successfully used it to awaken all of the old fears in the Tory Party establishment about the unnerving figure leading them in an uncomfortable, unfamiliar direction. The Prime Minister subsequently claimed that in my speech I had moved the Conservative Party to the right and that this opened the centre ground for him. Appropriately enough, the main speaker at the Conservative press conference that morning was Reg Prentice, former Labour Cabinet minister and now Conservative Party candidate, who with other ‘converts’ from socialism was living proof that it was Labour which had shifted leftwards. But in any case I agreed with Keith Joseph that it was the ‘common ground’, not the ‘middle ground’, on which we must stake our case. From now on a gap opened up between the way in which Central Office wished to campaign and the direction I insisted on taking.

  Such problems were not, however, immediately evident to me. Tuesday morning’s newspapers carried a report of an NOP poll suggesting that our lead was just 6 per cent, but compared with earlier NOP polls it did not suggest any narrowing of the gap. (Throughout the campaign the opinion polls were to give very different pictures of the balance of party support, ranging from the most exiguous of Tory leads — in one case a slight Labour lead — to an improbably overwhelming Tory landslide.) I felt it was an effective day’s campaigning, beginning in Bristol where I visited the Kleeneze brush factory to use every possible photo-opportunity to demonstrate my intention of ‘sweeping away the cobwebs’, ‘applying a new broom’ etc.

  Also in Bristol I was on the receiving end of the Election Gall pro
gramme hosted by Robin Day. There is always an element of risk on these occasions. A well-briefed caller can expose gaps in a politician’s understanding which most political opponents never could. Moreover, judging the correct reaction is always more difficult when you cannot see the person to whom you are talking over the telephone. But I felt that this Election Call went particularly well, because the points raised with me were on the precise questions to which we had the most convincing answers — the need for tax cuts, controlling inflation, cutting back on government borrowing and encouraging small businesses. Of course, there were critical points too. I always felt that the key to dealing with these was to admit what had gone wrong and say clearly why a future Conservative Government would put it right. So on this occasion I agreed that the previous Conservative Government was indeed responsible for an increase in bureaucracy in the health service, and said how we were going to reverse it.

  On the way back from Bristol, taking the new Intercity 125 high-speed train, I stopped off in West Country constituencies and had my photo taken with the candidates, including Chris Patten on the station platform at Bath. The day finished with my addressing a meeting at Gravesend. Since Central Office was telling me that our support among pensioners was shaky I wrote out a press release reminding voters of the record of Conservative Governments on this point.

  The following day (Wednesday 18 April), after the morning press conference, I set off to campaign in East Anglia and the East Midlands. First stop was my bid for the agricultural vote. This consisted of a discussion of cattle feed with a friendly farmer, carefully navigating my way across a field full of cows (I had forgotten my boots) and then cradling a calf in my arms for the benefit of the cameras and, I hoped, the wider public. I had no experience with calves and I was not certain of the right technique. With cameramen from five continents present, Denis, ever realistic, warned that ‘If we’re not careful, we’ll have a dead calf on our hands.’ But it survived my attentions and those of the photographers. Fortunately, perhaps, the calf was not able to give an interview.

  THE SECOND WEEK — D–14 to D–7

  By now (Thursday 19 April) much agonizing had taken place back in London about the implications of my Cardiff speech for the ‘positioning’ of the Party and our campaign. Peter Thorneycroft had persuaded himself that we had made a strategic error which should not be repeated. And since nothing that Central Office or my colleagues did seemed to get much publicity, he decided to involve himself in the drafting of my speeches. Oblivious to all this, I spent that Thursday morning visiting a Leicester textile factory, where I put my childhood training to good effect by stitching overall pockets amid a chaotic crowd of journalists and an astonished workforce.

  It was, however, just before the bus arrived at the Cadbury factory in Bournville that I learned that Peter Thorneycroft was insisting that a strong passage on trade unions, drafted by Paul Johnson, one of Britain’s leading journalists, an historian and a convert from socialism, should be removed from that evening’s speech in Birmingham — the second major rally of the campaign. Peter thought it too provocative. He had also apparently intervened to stop Keith Joseph speaking on the same subject. I did not agree with Peter’s assessment. But being away from London I felt insufficiently sure of my judgement to substitute it for his. So I angrily tore out the relevant pages of my draft speech and inserted some more innocuous passages. I contented myself with the knowledge that the last section of the speech, with which I had been helped by Peter Carrington, contained some extremely strong stuff on defence and foreign affairs, deliberately adopting the tone and some of the language of my earlier Kensington Town Hall speech.

  But I was not in the best of humour as our coach drew up in front of the factory. I had specifically said that I did not want a formal reception committee, but rather to go straight in and talk to individual managers and workers. Now I saw two long lines of people in white hats and coats. I could not for the moment see the camera crews but I had no doubt that they were waiting somewhere to take suitable shots of this ludicrous scene. I stayed on the bus for a minute or two to regain my cool. It was only then that I realized that I knew the faces of what I had assumed to be the factory staff. It was the pressmen who, doubtless informed of my earlier instructions, had dressed up in white overalls as a joke. As I left the bus they held up their cameras as a kind of arch beneath which I entered the factory. They were so carried away with their joke that they forgot to take any photographs; but they helped me see the funny side of campaigning, for which I suspect we were all grateful.

  Having sewn pockets in the morning, I suppose it was only natural that I should find myself sorting chocolates in the afternoon. It was a tricky, demanding task — the sort which gives the lie to the loosely-used expression ‘unskilled work’. It was many years since I myself had worked in a factory, but I saw that some traditions do not change. One girl who was shortly getting married had all her wedding presents laid out on a table close to the production line for her friends to see. After my chocolate-packing was over, we all discussed them at rather greater length than my programme allowed. In the end I was bustled away, for we had to get to the Midland Hotel in Birmingham. As a chocolate addict, I never thought I would lose my appetite for them. But somehow that clinging smell of vanilla put me off them for the rest of the campaign.

  The Birmingham speech, for all the trouble its preparation had caused, was a great success — not just the passages on East-West relations and the communist threat, but also those on law and order, on which I pledged to ‘place a barrier of steel’ against the socialist path to lawlessness. Afterwards we drove back to London where the following day’s (Friday 20 April) constituency visits would take place.

  Saturday 21 April was a day of regular campaigning which began at a factory producing highly sophisticated electrical components in Milton Keynes. I was excited by the technology, about which I had been thoroughly briefed, and soon found myself giving a detailed exposition of it to a group of slightly bemused pressmen. I was then wired up and tested on a heart monitoring machine. With all the dials pointing in the right direction I was shown to be in good working order: ‘Solid as a rock,’ as I remarked — something which also reflected my judgement about how our campaign as a whole was going. For one of the oddest characteristics of the 1979 general election campaign was the wide and growing difference of perceptions between those of us who were out in the field and those who were back at the centre. Of course, politicians, like everyone else, are susceptible to self-delusion. But, far more than in 1983 and 1987 when security considerations loomed so large, I was confident that I did have a real sense of what the electorate felt and that their hearts were with us. I was also convinced that this change had come about largely because of the events of the winter of 1978/79 and that therefore undue caution on the issue of trade union power was bad tactics.

  But it was clear from discussion at the strategy meeting I held in Flood Street on Sunday 22 April that not everyone saw matters this way. Although the opinion polls were still varied — one showing a 20 per cent and another a 5.5 per cent Conservative lead — there had not been much movement during the campaign. Peter Thorneycroft’s view was that we should more or less carry on as we were. As he put it in a paper for that Sunday’s meeting: ‘We should not embark on any high-risk initiatives. We are in the lead.’ This seemed to me fair enough as far as it went. But it begged two questions. First, had we not gained our lead in the first place by taking some quite high-risk initiatives, such as my interventions in the Winter of Discontent? Secondly, what now constituted a ‘high risk’? Measures to curb union power? Or the absence of them? In any case, one of the greatest dangers in a campaign where you have started out with a significant lead is complacency. Exciting the voters, as long as it is not on some issue on which they disagree with you, is an indispensable part of winning elections.

  My campaigning that week would take me to the North of England, before going on to Scotland. After the Monday morning p
ress conference, I flew to Newcastle where the photo-opportunity was at a tea factory. Tasting the sludgy concoctions, undiluted and unmasked by milk and sugar, had something of the same effect on my tea drinking as did the Bournville factory on my consumption of chocolates.

  Outside the factory a crowd had gathered, among which was a large, formidable woman who was pouring out a torrent of abuse in my direction. The police advised me to stay away. But I felt that if she had something to say she had better do so to my face rather than my back, and so I walked over to talk to her. I took her arm and told her quietly just to say what was wrong. Her manner changed completely. She had the usual grumbles and worries. But the real cause of her anger was a conviction that politicians were just not people who listened. I tried to answer as best I could and we parted amicably. As I walked away I heard her unmistakable tones telling a friend: ‘I told you she wasn’t half so bad.’ My experience of campaigning over the years is that there are very few irredeemably hostile electors. It is one of the tragedies of the terrorist threat that politicians nowadays have so few opportunities to convince themselves of that fact.

  Tuesday, too, was very much a traditional-style campaigning day, with four walkabouts, including a visit to the Sowerby candidate, Donald Thompson’s butcher’s shop, and to a supermarket — after which the usual piles of purchases were taken back on the battle bus. On the steps of the Conservative Party offices in Halifax I was photographed in the drizzle holding up two shopping bags — a blue bag which contained the food which could have been bought for £1 in 1974 and a half-filled red bag which contained all that £1 would buy in Labour Britain in 1979. And if this was better politics than economics it was no worse for that. Among the no-nonsense Yorkshire people it went down well.