The Conservatives watched with interest the Bermondsey by-election of February 1983. Michael Foot had originally declared that he would prevent the candidacy of the radically left-wing Peter Tatchell* but eventually failed to do so. Supporters of the outgoing right-wing Labour MP Bob Mellish made crude jokes against Tatchell’s homosexuality (which, though he later became the nation’s best-known gay campaigner, he did not acknowledge at the time). These slurs were echoed by Liberal campaigners and a weird atmosphere of farce and bitterness prevailed. The by-election was a test case of Labour’s difficulties with its left, but the result, an overwhelming victory for the Liberal candidate, Simon Hughes,† with the largest swing (over 44 per cent) in by-election history, was not good news for the Tories. They feared that Labour might go into such national decline that the SDP–Liberal Alliance would overtake it, with frighteningly unpredictable electoral results.
There followed, on 15 March, the last Budget before the election. Neither showy nor particularly memorable, Howe’s plan reduced taxes on businesses, while seeking to cement Conservative support with a rise in personal tax allowances of 8.5 per cent more than inflation. A little over a week later came the Darlington by-election, considered the key barometer of Tory fortunes. If Labour lost the seat, there was a real possibility that the party would ditch Michael Foot as leader and veer suddenly towards electability. The Alliance went all out to win. In the event, Labour narrowly held the seat from the Conservatives. The SDP candidate got a good vote but did not break through. This result was satisfactory for the Tories.
Even now, Mrs Thatcher hung back. Sensing the pressure on her to go to the country, and trying to make it difficult for her to do so, Denis Healey heckled her in the House of Commons for wanting to ‘cut and run’. She became so heated at this suggestion of cowardice that she let slip a bit of the Lincolnshire dialect which her education had ironed out of her:
The right hon. Gentleman is afraid of an election, is he? Afraid? Frightened? Frit? Could not take it? Cannot stand it? If I were going to cut and run, I should have gone after the Falklands. Frightened! Right now inflation is lower than it has been for 13 years – a record which the right hon. Gentleman could not begin to touch.10
Without quite meaning to, she was campaigning already. Good results in the local elections on 5 May removed the last obvious remaining objection to going to the polls, although Mrs Thatcher still harboured doubts (‘I wasn’t quite certain whether the results were good enough’).11*
The manifesto was ready, and so were the troops. The press was also gearing up for an election. In his summary of the weekend’s news coverage, Bernard Ingham† advised Mrs Thatcher that ‘there is only one topic: the election … and when (and whether) an announcement will be made.’ On this note she scribbled the words ‘Calm Down.’12 That Sunday, 8 May, Mrs Thatcher held a meeting of those most involved in the campaign, at Chequers. To it came Whitelaw, Parkinson and his Vice-Chairman, Michael Spicer,* Howe (who was in charge of the manifesto), Tebbit, the Chief Whip, Michael Jopling,† her parliamentary private secretary (PPS), Ian Gow‡ and various advisers. The politicians liked to refer to themselves ironically as ‘the Magnificent Seven’. Denis Healey mocked them as ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’.13 The idea of the meeting, which was Cecil Parkinson’s, was to take her through everything – ‘the main thing was to reassure her that you had thought it through.’14
It was absolutely obvious to all concerned that an election should be called – to all, that is, except Mrs Thatcher herself. She was, perhaps, ‘frit’. She was given an exhaustive presentation of the local election results, which suggested a large Tory majority in a general election, and she also had in her hand an ORC poll privately conducted for the Conservative Party. It gave the Tories a lead of 10 per cent over Labour (44 per cent to 34 per cent), and put the Alliance, by now a formal electoral pact between Liberals and SDP, on 20 per cent.15 Even this did not seem good enough to her. Neither did any of the other omens. She did not want to call the poll for 16 June because that was the week of the royal race meeting at Ascot and she ‘was not going to have people in grey suits and toppers heading the news pages at a time when three million were unemployed’.16 She complained that if she called the poll earlier she would not be able to attend President Reagan’s G7 summit at the end of May. She still fretted about the unseemliness of ‘going early’.
The main meeting finished without any decision. Parkinson, Jopling and Gow stayed to supper. Mrs Thatcher tried one last, futile way of avoiding the issue. The Queen, she objected, would not be available at such short notice to grant a dissolution. Ian Gow slipped out of the room and returned to say that he had spoken to the Palace, and the Queen would be happy to see the Prime Minister at noon the following day. ‘If looks could kill, she’d have killed him.’17 As Parkinson explained: ‘Her resistance to an idea is a technique meaning “Persuade me.” ’18 It was also, as Jopling observed, a way of shifting responsibility: ‘She was saying, “If this is what you want to do, do it, but don’t blame me if it all goes wrong.” ’19 After the supper guests had left, Mount heard Mrs Thatcher say to Denis: ‘I’m not sure it’s the right thing to do at all. I shall sleep on it. It’s always best to sleep on these things.’ As Mount wrote: ‘For the only time when I was around (though there must often have been such occasions in the privacy of their boudoir), Denis lost patience. “You can’t do that, Margaret. They’ve all gone back to town saying it’s going to be the 9th. You can’t go back on that now. The horses have bolted.” ’20 So 9 June it was.
Parkinson was in no rush to start campaigning. As soon as the election was called, there was a surge in favour of the Conservatives. One poll, on 12 May 1983, even gave them a 21-point lead over Labour. On 13 May, honouring a long-standing commitment, Mrs Thatcher visited the Scottish Conservative Party conference in Perth. She sensed ‘tremendous enthusiasm’ and a ‘really great feeling of togetherness’.21* It was not until 18 May that the party’s manifesto was launched. Its process of composition had been more concentrated than in 1979. All departments had been asked for manifesto ideas, of course, but most of the work, under Howe’s chairmanship, was done by Mount and Adam Ridley, Howe’s special adviser (‘Ferdy was excellent,’ Mrs Thatcher later judged).22 As is generally the case in government, the manifesto came under closer central control than in opposition, and the process of party policy formulation was winding down,23 with results which would be deleterious in the longer term. Mrs Thatcher herself, however, had less to do with it than in 1979. She was very busy and, now that she had an actual record on which to fight, the manifesto had become less important in her mind. In her memoirs, she recorded that she was ‘somewhat disappointed’24 by the document that emerged, which she believed reflected Howe’s over-cautious nature, but colleagues did not remember her complaining at the time.
The tone of the Conservative manifesto mostly reflected the more ‘small c’ conservative and less radical side of her party’s nature. In her foreword, Mrs Thatcher spoke not of revolution, but of recovery. Britain had renewed its ‘confidence and self-respect’. The task was ‘to defend Britain’s traditional liberties and distinctive way of life’. ‘Abroad,’ the manifesto concluded, ‘Britain is regarded for the first time in years as a country with a great future as well as a great past.’ Emphasis was laid on the importance of Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent and of the deployment of US missiles in Europe if disarmament negotiations failed. Labour’s anti-nuclear policy would ‘shatter the NATO Alliance, and put our safety in the greatest jeopardy’. Oddly though, and, as Mrs Thatcher later publicly admitted, by mistake the new submarine-borne Trident nuclear missiles were not mentioned by name.
The document was quite short, and its specific promises were few. Trade union members would be given the right to ballot for election to their governing bodies, and the legal immunity of unions would be withdrawn if a strike were called without a secret ballot. Members must decide every ten years whether their union should have
party political funds and should be guaranteed a right of choice (perhaps only by ‘contracting out’) about whether they paid the political levy. On unemployment, the manifesto promoted the enormous Youth Training Scheme devised the previous year by David Young and Norman Tebbit to ensure that every school-leaver not in further education would be in work or training: 350,000 young people would be in the scheme by the autumn. Health was presented in terms of extra money spent and higher numbers of people employed: questions of structural reform were avoided. The Conservative claim was that only £7.75 billion had been spent on the National Health Service in 1979, compared with £15.5 billion in 1983. Voucher schemes having run into the sand, serious education reforms were not mentioned. Promises on tax were studiously vague, and modest, in no way presaging the huge tax reform programme of which radicals like Nigel Lawson dreamed. The only eye-catching announcements fell in two areas. BT, Rolls-Royce, British Airways and parts of several other named nationalized industries, including British Steel and British Leyland, would be sold off. Replacement of the rates was not promised, though local authority high spending would be curbed. The GLC and the metropolitan counties would be abolished.
The Conservative manifesto was, in fact, a well-constructed document, creating the space for widespread reform without alarming people with strident language or dangerous detail. But the Tories had much more relish for Labour’s manifesto – famously described by the Labour MP Gerald Kaufman* as ‘the longest suicide note in history’ – than for their own. With its pledges to renationalize industries, end the sale of council houses, get out of the European Community and disarm unilaterally, it was an electoral gift to the Conservatives. Mrs Thatcher carried it round with her at all times in the campaign, and quoted from it gleefully in almost all her main speeches. She counted ‘at least forty seven new ways’ in which it would put Britain in ‘a Socialist straitjacket’.25*
The press conference which launched the Conservative manifesto set the tone of the campaign. Mrs Thatcher was fizzing with energy, and in no mood to play things down. The choice at the election was ‘absolutely stark in philosophical terms’,26 she said: did Britain want greater liberty and a smaller public sector, or a return to state socialism? Although Geoffrey Howe also spoke, and she invited questions to other members of her Cabinet sitting on the platform, she dominated the show, and tended, to the amusement of the press, to butt in. One questioner† noted that the manifesto seemed to leave the way open for talks with Argentina about the Falkland Islands, and asked Francis Pym if this was the case. Pym starting talking about ‘further sensible conversations’ with Argentina. Mrs Thatcher could bear it no longer, and cut across him: ‘No I’m sorry, I thought you [the press] were going to misunderstand that. The Foreign Secretary said quite clearly on commercial links … but not on sovereignty.’27 In fact, the Foreign Secretary had said no such thing, and his discomfiture at the general laughter was visible. The next day, Pym rashly declared that a landslide victory for the Conservatives would not be healthy. Mrs Thatcher responded, when challenged on this, that Pym had exhibited ‘a natural … Ex-Chief Whip’s caution. You know there’s a club of Chief Whips. They’re very unusual people.’28‡ It was apparent that Pym’s political career was drawing peacefully to its close.
The preparation for each day’s press conference was excellent. Mrs Thatcher began listening to the radio at 6.30, before appearing at Central Office at 8.15 for an exhaustive briefing. She loved this chance to suck in yet more information, and the exercise stopped her from having time to fret. Cecil Parkinson and Stephen Sherbourne,* who, despite a former association with Edward Heath, had become her chief political minder for the campaign, were ‘accomplished diplomats, who were brilliant at keeping her on course, her tangential monologues to a minimum and generally jollying everyone along’.29 Her absolute mastery of the material – what Sherbourne called her ‘mania for facts’ – contrasted very favourably in public with Michael Foot’s windy vagueness. The most dangerous issue, obviously, was unemployment, but Parkinson and Tebbit had developed a theme of what they called ‘shared responsibility’, in which the unions and the Labour Party, rather than just the government, were blamed for the problem of joblessness. One of the party’s posters reminded voters that no Labour government had ever brought down the level of unemployment. By frequent references to the subject and the detailed policy remedies being applied, Parkinson and Tebbit somehow managed to bore the press into the ground, and prevent Mrs Thatcher herself from being too closely identified with it. The media enjoyed the confidence and theatricality of Mrs Thatcher’s daily press conferences. The political scientist David Butler,† who attended them, noted privately, halfway through the campaign: ‘Mrs Thatcher at her press-conferences was extraordinarily self-confident and outgoing. She did sound as though she was completely on top of her situation and on top of all her colleagues. People laughed at her, but admiringly.’30 The pleasure the press took in these occasions emanated in their favourable coverage.
Parkinson was somewhat worried, however, that she ‘mustn’t allow herself to exhaust herself’.31 He wanted to ensure that she could have her interviews ‘in the can’ by the early evening, and to plan her travel ‘so that she could come back to No. 10 and think about the next day’.32 The best thing, once the press conferences had set the day’s agenda, was to get Mrs Thatcher away from London, charging up and down the country campaigning. This suited her temperament. As Stephen Sherbourne saw it: ‘It’s a shooting war, and she’s a footsoldier. She’s not the general back at HQ. She’s in the front line.’33 Except for a few setpiece speeches, the purpose of these journeys was not to make political arguments, but to be seen in a good light.
This succeeded. According to Frank Johnson, in his daily sketches of her campaign in The Times, Margaret and Denis had managed to become part of the national furniture. In Cornwall, Denis was ‘instantly recognised and acclaimed. Perhaps he is the quintessential Englishman of our time. “You look after her, won’t you?” they often cried.’34 As for Margaret, wrote Johnson, ‘having her as Prime Minister seems to be part of the natural order of things.’35 It was also true that Mrs Thatcher was highly unpopular in some areas, and was followed all round the country by a tiny mob of protesters from the Socialist Workers’ Party trying to disrupt her every word; but, in enough people’s eyes, this probably enhanced and certainly did not diminish her standing. Mrs Thatcher enjoyed the ‘old-fashioned style of campaigning which we used to do’. She relished the chance to respond to hecklers and ‘was thrilled to bits’ when they showed up.36 For the most part, she was photographed from favourable angles in pleasant places. In the Isle of Wight (which the Conservatives nevertheless failed to win), she swept up the beach at the prow of a hovercraft, as if she were the figurehead of Britannia on a man o’ war. At a Finchley supermarket, she went on one of her manic pretend shopping trips, spending £11.94 on goods which included part-baked rolls, cling-film and the unpleasant new English cheese Lymeswold. ‘I went to the supermarket and said “Please have you got any English bacon?” And they said they only had Danish bacon.’37 She forgot to take any money, and so Carol, accompanying her to write a diary of the campaign, had to pay. While Mrs Thatcher was photographed making fast, orderly and usually friendly progress round the country, Michael Foot had a hard time. There was no discernible pattern to his outings, and he himself, with his poor sight, lack of a sense of direction and inadequate staff, was seen to wander confusedly about. Accompanied by his walking stick and his dog Dizzie (sportingly named after the Tory Prime Minister Disraeli, about whom he had written), Foot was an endearing figure to most of the voters who saw him, but not remotely a prime ministerial one.*
In these circumstances, attacks on Mrs Thatcher which, in more normal times, might well have struck home, failed. The Conservatives’ private polling did pick up some anxiety about the NHS and that Mrs Thatcher was considered too ‘uncaring’. In the view of some party officials, she was ‘excessively arrogant’38 in the early
stages of the campaign. But, to a surprising degree, political assaults on her backfired. This was particularly true of anything in relation to the Falklands, a subject on which she wisely said little. Denis Healey accused her of ‘glorying in slaughter’* over the recapture of South Georgia, and was forced to retract this, saying that he had meant to say ‘glorying in conflict’. Labour’s rising star, Neil Kinnock,† hitting back at a heckler who shouted that Mrs Thatcher had ‘guts’, said it was ‘a pity that people had to leave theirs on the ground at Goose Green in order to prove it’.39‡ These remarks damaged only Labour. The party’s activists reported that voters ‘really admired’ Mrs Thatcher over the Falklands and that, as a result, ‘Labour was now seen as the unpatriotic party.’40
The Conservatives could not push this line directly in relation to the Falklands, but they could and did in relation to nuclear weapons. Especially among working-class voters, the idea that Labour would leave Britain undefended rendered it automatically unfit for government. This point was brought out most effectively by the Labour former Prime Minister James Callaghan. On 25 May, halfway through the campaign, he launched a fierce attack on his party’s anti-nuclear policy, pointing out the Russians’ game: ‘The Soviet Union’s propaganda clearly wishes to use public opinion in this country to get the West to reduce its own arms while doing nothing themselves. In this way they would gain nuclear superiority. This is simply not on.’41 Most voters agreed. As defence secretary, Michael Heseltine took on CND directly, charging them and, by implication the Labour Party, with advancing the Soviet cause. This impressed Mrs Thatcher, who recalled with pleasure Heseltine’s success in inflicting a ‘series of defeats on CND and the Labour Left’.42 Once the word ‘unilateral’ was delatinized and rendered as ‘one-sided’ – a conscious decision of the Tory campaigners – it spelt electoral death to Labour. ‘Patriotism’ had been ‘restored to our vocabulary’,43 Mrs Thatcher told party supporters in Cardiff. Even more importantly, it had become linked, for the first time in modern British politics, with only one party.
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