Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, Volume 2

by Charles Moore

  Two days later, en route to No. 10, Young decided to call on Tebbit to explain that he was seeing Mrs Thatcher to discuss the ways he might ‘help in the election’.64 Tebbit, Young recorded, ‘seemed quite agreeable’. The two men had been friends when Tebbit was at the Department of Employment, and indeed it was Tebbit who had appointed Young head of the Manpower Services Commission, the job which was his springboard into politics. As Young reminded him, the combination of the two of them, plus Peter Morrison at Central Office, was a re-creation of ‘the old team’ at the Department of Employment. But by now the old team spirit had gone. The relationship had become wary, though there had been no open breach. In his memoirs, Tebbit writes: ‘We had worked closely together in the past and had met regularly to discuss the coming campaign. What is more, Margaret Thatcher liked and trusted him. So I invited David into Central Office to help in the election campaign.’65 While technically true, these words give almost no sense of what was actually happening, which was much more disagreeable for Tebbit.

  Tebbit told Young that he planned a campaign which would expose the dangers of the Alliance by reminding people how the Lib–Lab Pact in the late 1970s had enabled the Winter of Discontent. This tactic arose from Tebbit’s view that the party needed to have alternative strategies for fighting either the Alliance or Labour, depending on who was emerging as the main enemy. This was added to the Thatcher charge-sheet against him: ‘It was too complicated for Margaret,’ Tebbit recalled.66 Her preferred tactic was always to concentrate fire on Labour and marginalize the Alliance, treating it mainly as the subject for comedy. ‘Some Tory strategists – but not I’, she later wrote, ‘– thought [the Alliance] were the principal threat to us.’67†

  After his conversation with Tebbit, Young obtained from Robert Armstrong’s office the carefully guarded key which allowed passage from the Cabinet Office to 10 Downing Street, and went through to see Mrs Thatcher. He told her she should employ him to make everything ready for a general election from June if the local election results on 7 May were satisfactory. ‘ “Yes,” she replied. “You must. You must first help with the presentation of the manifesto – the way it looks.” ’68 Young advised her that the only really important thing was to get her on television all the time ‘being met by adoring crowds’. Then the two descended from her study to the Cabinet Room where ministers were gathering to hear Lawson unveil the Budget that he would present to the Commons that afternoon. Lawson’s good news ‘received a marvellous reception’.69 Mrs Thatcher asked Tebbit to stay behind at the end of the meeting, with Young. She told him that she had been thinking about the campaign: ‘David’s got some free time now, I’d like him to come and help.’ According to Young, ‘Norman looked only slightly surprised and said, “Well, of course that’s no problem, I’d love that.” ’70 He did not love it at all.

  Before Young’s new role was announced to the press, he had dinner with Peter Morrison. Morrison told Young that ‘Norman was not the same Norman that we both worked for three years back, for since the bomb he was a different person. I began to get from Peter the same feeling that I was getting from people outside the Party about the state of Central Office.’71 This refrain about Tebbit being ‘not the same Norman’ was frequently used against him – and also, more rarely, for him, by those who argued he had become a deeper, wiser man. For Young, as for Tim Bell, it was a means of legitimizing their ambition to marginalize him. A covert struggle was in progress to run the election campaign and thus to take credit for the expected victory. Tim Bell and Howell James had even found its chronicler, the journalist Rod Tyler, who was close to Mrs Thatcher and had previously, via Bell, been the ‘ghost’ for Ian MacGregor’s autobiography. As he took up his work at Central Office, Young recorded, he had a drink with Tyler.72 From then on, Tyler had access to the inner workings of Central Office and the Thatcher election entourage, and an informal prime ministerial blessing. His ‘instant’ book about it, Campaign! (1987), was well informed, but naturally took the part of those who got him in on it. Tebbit considered that Young was ‘the prime briefer’ against him to Mrs Thatcher, and was ‘intensely ambitious’.73

  All this was a recipe for conflict. On 5 April, Young was informed that ‘Norman was spitting blood about my appointment,’74 so he arranged to see the Chairman the following day. They met. By his account, Young began the conversation:

  ‘I wanted to have a chat with you to see how we can work together.’

  ‘Oh it’s very difficult.’

  ‘Norman, I’m only here to help you. If you want me to push off, just say the word and I’ll go.’ There followed the most difficult 45 minutes since I first tried to persuade a bank manager to give me my first overdraft.75

  After expressing oblique resentment at Young’s intrusion, Tebbit complained that Mrs Thatcher did not like the plan he had devised for her election tour. ‘Norman … you know what she’s like,’ Young replied; ‘… if you produce the tour it’s no good, if I produce the same tour it’ll be fine.’76 In Young’s mind, this point was supposed to be ‘a laugh’ at Mrs Thatcher’s expense. It is doubtful if Tebbit found it amusing. A non-working relationship was established before a shot had been fired in the general election. This mattered, because it was not merely a problem of ill feeling between Tebbit and Young. It related closely to Mrs Thatcher herself. ‘Norman’, recalled Michael Dobbs, ‘would return from No. 10 and not know what to do next. He felt, rightly, that he wasn’t part of her inner circle.’77

  It gives perspective on the slight unreality of the situation to note that, in the midst of all this antagonism, the exterior political circumstances were extremely favourable. On 5 April, an opinion poll in the Sunday Times, taken in the wake of Mrs Thatcher’s triumphant Moscow visit, showed the Conservatives 12 points ahead of the Alliance, with Labour now in third place.78

  Despite the atmosphere of intrigue, the preparation of the manifesto had been relatively orderly. It depended on the idea of a hinge between what had happened since 1979 and what would happen next. Mrs Thatcher had commissioned a glossy pamphlet called Our First Eight Years: The Conservative Party, listing the achievements of two terms. This was conceived as a companion to the manifesto designed to win the third. The concept fitted neatly with the A-Team’s attempt to make the government work as one and with the successful Tebbit framework for the previous year’s party conference – ‘The Next Move Forward’. Indeed, no one could think of a better title for the manifesto, except to make the ideas plural: it was called The Next Moves Forward.*

  Mrs Thatcher felt the previous manifesto in 1983 had missed a chance to set out a full agenda. She wanted the next one to ‘keep the forward momentum … on the lines of the fundamental principles’.79 This would mean many more new ideas, more detail, and more specific promises than in 1983. The ‘anchor man’ for bringing the drafts together was John MacGregor, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, whom Mrs Thatcher remembered as being ‘nothing like as good as he was made out to be’80 for this task. The chief draftsman was John O’Sullivan* of the Policy Unit, who had, she thought, ‘a genius for presenting everything’81 but also, according to some others, a genius for being late. He was assisted by Ronnie Millar, who contributed the more purple passages. O’Sullivan’s draft was disparaged for its excessive length, but the unit’s argument, which Mrs Thatcher accepted, was that ‘We needed to prove why again,’82 and to explain the reason that some things still remained to be done. The Conservative case had to be shown as a historical development which would reveal its logic: it was ‘rolling Thatcherism’. The first term had been about rescuing the economy from disaster. The second had been about creating the right conditions for economic opportunity. The third would turn more to ‘social Thatcherism’ – the themes of responsibility and choice applied to the realm of public services. On health, however, where the Tories, always nervous on the subject, had no radical plans, the only tactic was to boast about how much had been spent. As Mrs Thatcher put it when preparing her memoirs, ‘I
had said “Well, we’ll tackle education and housing this time, and we’ll leave any detailed changes in the health service to come up after the election.” ’83 This was not because she had a hidden agenda, but because she had very little agenda on health at all.†

  It became more and more obvious to those involved that the election would be held in June. In practice, this did not include 4 June because this was a Jewish holiday, and Mrs Thatcher wanted to be sure that Jewish residents in her own constituency of Finchley would not be impeded from voting for her.84 On Wednesday 15 April, Mrs Thatcher had a meeting at No. 10 with Maurice Saatchi. Tebbit was also present, on Sherbourne’s recommendation, lest his exclusion ‘cause a problem in the relationship between you and the Chairman which might spill over into the following day’s meeting’.85 At the Maundy Thursday meeting the next day, Young told her ‘with a twinkle’ that ‘by coincidence’ his department had booked lots of poster sites for May and June.86 If an election were called, government advertising was forbidden and so the sites would fall vacant, and could be used for party advertising: ‘It so happened that Saatchis would have an option on these sites.’

  Mrs Thatcher then went off to Scotney Castle in Kent, where, because she now owned the Dulwich house, she was finally relinquishing her lease on the flat. She sorted out and packed up her possessions and then spent Easter Day at Chequers. The next morning she held an all-day meeting there, starting off ‘at a tremendous rate of knots, saying that the manifesto wouldn’t do and that it wasn’t enough to talk about the past’.87 As was her often infuriating wont, she went through everything, ‘always saying “Why?” ’ By late afternoon, she ‘started to get fidgety about the timing of the election’, and also criticized Young for his choice of places for her to visit in the campaign. She kept saying, ‘I must go to large factories, I must go to large factories.’

  Meetings such as this, with Mrs Thatcher jumping all over the place, sometimes fastening on tiny things, sometimes reaching for the big picture, sometimes confident, sometimes unbearably anxious, were a constant feature of the prelude to the campaign. In all this time, no agreement was reached about several vital aspects. Tim Bell’s role remained vague, and hidden from colleagues. There was talk of him being announced as a ‘consultant’ to Central Office, where he would ‘be plugged into David Young, who would then channel Tim’s ideas’ to Mrs Thatcher.88 But none of this was cleared with Tebbit, who kept complaining to Young that he did not know what was happening. Young, Sherbourne reported to Mrs Thatcher, felt that Tebbit was ‘still a bit anxious’ about his (Young’s) involvement in the campaign and so suggested that she handle Tebbit carefully.89 Young’s role remained unclear. Although he now had the use of a room in Central Office, he had no job title and no defined task. Even as he made himself more and more central to the campaign, he kept asking Mrs Thatcher what she wanted him to do. She rarely gave a clear answer. Despite being one of her greatest admirers, Young felt that ‘She just did not know how to deal with people.’ Because she never resolved the Tebbit question, ‘I was walking on eggshells.’90 To the informed exterior eye, the situation was very strange and it was not obvious why the electoral ‘virgin’ Young was the man to take over the campaign. ‘His was a ludicrous appointment,’ Nigel Lawson considered.91

  There were also conflicting views about who Mrs Thatcher should communicate with. Sherbourne warned her that ‘if David Young is your contact man, then the danger is increased of messages between you and the Chairman going wrong; with misunderstandings arising.’ He suggested that in an emergency Mrs Thatcher should speak either to Tebbit or to Peter Morrison.92 This was the era when mobile phones were just coming into use. Young arranged for all Cabinet ministers and others most involved in the campaign to carry them as they travelled round the country, but they were not necessarily effective. Some ministers did not even know how to turn them on or off.93 Young hoped Tebbit could be out on the road, where he was acknowledged as a good performer. This would have the added advantage of allowing Young to run Central Office. Mrs Thatcher sometimes favoured this idea but, fearing the misunderstandings of which Sherbourne wrote, sometimes got frightened that she might not be able to get hold of Tebbit at all times. She made clear that, despite Young’s discouragement, she wanted him to stay put in Smith Square.*

  The results of the local elections held on 7 May gave the Conservatives 40 per cent of the vote, Labour 30 per cent and the Alliance 27 per cent. There was therefore no remaining reason why the general election should not be held as quickly as possible.† Mrs Thatcher’s closest ministers and advisers gathered at Chequers on Sunday 10 May to take a final view. The Observer called the ministers – Whitelaw, Howe, Lawson, Tebbit, Young, Hurd and Wakeham – the ‘Seven Dwarfs’.‡ The night before, Mrs Thatcher arranged for Tim Bell to slip in, among family guests arriving for a dinner for Denis’s seventy-second birthday, and see her there unannounced. Young and his wife were invited to stay that Saturday with Willie and Celia Whitelaw at Whitelaw’s official residence, Dorneywood, before going over to Chequers the next day. The Hurds and Bakers were also present. Young was suddenly overcome with satisfaction at his new eminence among three of the other ‘dwarfs’. ‘We were talking in general about political dispositions,’ he wrote, ‘and I suddenly realised for the first time that almost unknown to myself I’d become part of the charmed circle.’94*

  Compared with Mrs Thatcher’s almost absurd indecision about the date of the 1983 election (see Chapter 3), the Chequers meeting was fairly straightforward. Everyone recommended 11 June and she did not seriously demur. More controversial was the idea that Mrs Thatcher would take part in a video for the candidates’ conference after the launch of the manifesto. At coffee after lunch, Young, who favoured her participation, sidled up to her.

  I saw my chance … and said ‘Did you have a good meeting with Tim [who had also been pushing the idea of the video]?’ She looked startled and said ‘Ssshhh!’ Evidently it was a very good meeting with Tim – she didn’t want Norman to hear and I found out from her that she was now keen on the video.95†

  Private opinion polls presented to her that afternoon, combined with an analysis of all the publicly available ones, encouraged her. An extrapolation from the local election results suggested a majority of 94. Tebbit gave her his cautious prediction – an overall majority of 19.96 Mrs Thatcher said she would sleep on all this and decide the next day. At a special Cabinet meeting at 11 o’clock the following morning, she announced that the election date would be 11 June. She then went to the Palace to seek the formal agreement of the Queen. Parliament would be dissolved a week later, and then the election campaign proper would begin.

  The intervening seven days did not go very well for Mrs Thatcher. Because of her long-standing belief that campaigns should be as short as possible, not much was organized for the first week. On the evening after firing the starting gun, however, she did agree to give an interview to the BBC that provided the first gaffe of the campaign. She explained, on camera, that the Conservatives had such a big agenda for the country that it would take her quite some time to accomplish. ‘Yes,’ she continued, ‘I hope to go on [pause] and on.’97 As soon as she had said this, she dropped her eyes from the camera, as if she realized she had said more than she should. The idea of her ‘going on and on’ fed into public anxieties about her domineering personality, and was quickly used against her. Whereas the Conservatives wished to emphasize the team and play down anything that would look like a personality cult, the Opposition parties, especially Labour, wanted to play on fear of her omnipotence. They could not deny her pre-eminence, but they could criticize it. The message to voters that Mrs Thatcher might be with them for ever if they let the Tories in again was calculated to put off a good many of them. In the course of the week, the gap between the Tories and the other parties shortened noticeably and Labour pulled well ahead of the Alliance.

  Nicholas Garland, Independent, 12 May 1987.

  In her own memory of these events in retire
ment – though she was not to be relied on about dates – Mrs Thatcher recalled Tebbit taking up this hostile theme: ‘During the election campaign … he was virtually telling me that I was the problem. He’d say “People say ‘TBW’.” I’d say, “What do you mean ‘TBW’?” He’d say: “That Bloody Woman!” … He came to the conclusion that I was stopping the party from winning, and I really wasn’t going to admit that.’98

  It was in the context of this personal criticism that the candidates’ video (espoused by Young and Bell) became problematic. Introduced by Tebbit as if he were the conductor of the orchestra, the film showed six other ministers lauding the Tory achievements of the past eight years, including Geoffrey Howe making the rash claim that Britain was ‘no longer quarrelling in Europe’. ‘I feared it was bound to seem pretty insulting to Mrs Thatcher,’ recalled John Wakeham, ‘because to some it made Norman look like the quasi-Prime Minister.’99 There was no interview with the actual Prime Minister. Instead, the film ended with rousing film clips of her with Reagan, Gorbachev, Kohl, Mitterrand, the Chinese and the Saudis. Those involved were proud of their work and Howell James arranged for Channel 4 to film them watching the video being put together. Young in particular, was pleased. ‘The manifesto film made Norman the hero,’ he told his diary. ‘But I think Channel 4 … will be using some of today’s filming and I think I will be seen to be the person behind it all.’100

  The following Monday, Young arranged to show Mrs Thatcher the video in Downing Street. He noted what happened next:

  At the end she said: ‘Marvellous! It’s so fantastic – we should use it as a party election broadcast.’ Then she added, ‘Well, on the other hand it only shows me overseas. The manifesto is mine, but it all appears to be Norman. It is my manifesto!’ She worked herself up in a rather embarrassing way … Really for the first time ever I thought she appeared very much a woman … This went on for more than a few minutes and it got quite difficult.101