The Iron Lady

by John Campbell

  The result of this emphasis on promoting her personality rather than her policies was to enable Mrs Thatcher to overcome the perceived handicaps of her class and her sex. In place of the Home Counties Tory lady in a stripy hat, married to a rich husband, whose children had attended the most expensive private schools, she forced the media to redefine her as a battling meritocrat who had raised herself by hard work from a humble provincial background – an inspiration to others, whatever their start in life, who had the ambition, ability and guts to do the same. The transformation did not convince everyone. But long before 1979 she had shown that she could appeal much more widely than her critics had thought possible in 1974. She was not popular, but she was no longer patronised. On the contrary, she had immensely widened the range of available stereotypes for a woman politician, and in doing so transformed her gender from a liability into an asset. First of all she did not try to escape the traditional female stereotype of the housewife, but positively embraced it and turned it to her advantage. Her willingness to act up to the role of ordinary wife and home-maker infuriated feminists, who thought she thereby devalued the whole project of a woman storming the seats of male power. But Mrs Thatcher knew what she was doing. By boasting that she still cooked Denis’s breakfast for him every morning, still did her own shopping and even used to ‘pop up to the launderette’ regularly, she encouraged millions of women to identify with her as they had never been able to identify with any previous politician, male or female. Rich though she was, she sounded as if she understood the problems of daily living in a way that Heath and Callaghan never could. ‘They will turn to me’, she told John Cole, ‘because they believe a woman knows about prices.’27 Mrs Thatcher’s homely lectures on ‘housewife economics’, expressed in the language of domestic budgeting, made monetarism sound like common sense.

  But Mrs Thatcher was also able to tap into another range of female types: established role models of women in positions of authority whom men were used to obeying. Thus she was the Teacher, patiently but with absolute certainty explaining the answers to the nation’s problems: and the Headmistress exhorting the electorate to pull its socks up. She was Doctor Thatcher, or sometimes Nurse Thatcher, prescribing nasty medicine or a strict diet which the voters knew in their hearts would be good for them.

  Finally she was Britannia, the feminine embodiment of patriotism, wrapping herself unselfconsciously in the Union Jack. No politician since Churchill had appealed so emotionally to British nationalism. Unquestionably it was her sex that enabled Mrs Thatcher to get away with it. She was not yet the full-blown Warrior Queen, the combination of Britannia, Boadicea and Elizabeth I that she became after the Falklands war. But already, thanks to the Russians, she was ‘the Iron Lady’ – recognised as a strong leader ready to stand up to foreign dictators, calling on the nation to look to its defences. While visiting British forces in Germany she was even able to be photographed in a tank without looking silly. No previous woman politician could have done that. As a result, when The Economist announced at the beginning of the 1979 election campaign that ‘The issue is Thatcher’ it meant her personality and her politics, not her sex.28 That was already a huge achievement.

  9

  Into Downing Street

  ‘Labour Isn’t Working’

  THE summer of 1978 was the lowest point of Mrs Thatcher’s leadership, when it suddenly began to look possible that she might lose the coming election. Though unemployment was still around 1.5 million, inflation was down to single figures and the pound was riding high. The economic outlook was unquestionably improving, and in his April budget Denis Healey was able to make some modest tax cuts. The Tories’ leap in the polls following Mrs Thatcher’s immigration broadcast in January proved to be short-lived. By May the parties were neck and neck again, and in August Labour took a four-point lead. Callaghan’s personal approval rating was consistently above 50 per cent, Mrs Thatcher’s often below 40 per cent. Her efforts to portray Labour as wildly left wing were becoming increasingly implausible; on the contrary, Callaghan was widely recognised as ‘the best Conservative Prime Minister we have’,1 while it was she who came over as scarily extreme.

  It was specifically to try to forestall an early election that Saatchi & Saatchi came up with ‘Labour Isn’t Working’. The dole queue design broke the conventions of political advertising, first because it mentioned the other party by name, and second because unemployment was traditionally a ‘Labour’ issue on which the Tories could never hope to win. In fact only twenty posters ever went up, but their effect was hugely amplified by Labour howls of protest, which meant that the image was reproduced – often several times – in every newspaper and on television. The revelation that the queue was actually made up of Young Conservatives made no difference to the message. The public was reminded that unemployment was still intolerably high. The impact of ‘Labour Isn’t Working’ had exactly the desired effect of making Callaghan draw back from an early election. Instead he committed himself to trying to get through the winter, with a tough limit on pay increases of just 5 per cent. It was a fateful mistake.

  At the beginning of December 1978 Callaghan came back from a European Council meeting in Brussels and announced that Britain, in common with Ireland and Italy, would not be joining the European Monetary System (EMS) – the latest venture in European integration originally foreshadowed by Heath, Georges Pompidou and Willy Brandt in 1972 and now brought to fruition by Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, Helmut Schmidt and the first British President of the Commission, Roy Jenkins. Mrs Thatcher immediately condemned the Government’s decision. ‘This is a sad day for Europe,’ she declared in the Commons.2

  In the light of her own adamant determination to stay out of the EMS over the next ten years her enthusiasm for joining in 1978 is remarkable. Yet her own attitude to Europe was always firmly Gaullist. She wanted Britain to lead in Europe, not because she had a vision of European integration but because her vision of Britain demanded nothing less. In this at least she was at one with Heath. ‘If we always go to the Community as a supplicant,’ she told Callaghan in December 1976, ‘either for subsidies or for loans, that prevents us carrying out the wider creative role which was very much expected of us when we joined the Community.’3 She hated seeing Britain stay out of the EMS, not because she believed in the system for itself but because exclusion cast Britain ‘in the second division economically of European countries, and since Britain was the victor in Europe, this comes very hard to the British people’.4 Her view of Britain’s proper relationship to the Continent continued to be shaped by the memory of the war. Thus she never really grasped the idea of a European community as understood by the other members, but always saw it primarily as a defence organisation, an arm of NATO.

  Winter of discontent

  The winter of industrial action against the Government’s 5 per cent pay limit began in the private sector with a short but successful strike at the Ford Motor Company, which was doing well and preferred to pay increases of 15 – 17 per cent rather than suffer a long strike. On 3 January the road haulage drivers went on strike, demanding 25 per cent, followed by the oil tanker drivers, stopping deliveries to industry, power stations, hospitals and schools. Action quickly spread to local authority and National Health Service manual workers – porters, cleaners, janitors, refuse collectors and the like – demanding a £60 minimum wage. There followed two or three weeks of near anarchy, displaying the ugliest face of militant trade unionism. The transport of goods by road practically dried up. Employees were laid off as businesses were crippled by lack of deliveries, enforced by intimidatory and often violent picketing of docks and factories. Piles of rubbish lay uncollected in the streets. Roads were not gritted (in very cold weather), schools were closed and hospitals admitted only emergency cases, while shop stewards took it on themselves to determine what was an emergency. Most famously, in Liverpool, the dead went unburied. On 22 January 1.5 million workers joined in a national Day of Action, the biggest stoppage since t
he General Strike in 1926. All this left the Government looking helpless and irrelevant – an impression damagingly reinforced by Callaghan’s ill-judged attempt to play down the seriousness of the crisis on his return from a sunny G7 summit in Guadeloupe. He never actually used the words ‘Crisis? What crisis?’ but the Sun’s headline accurately paraphrased the impression he conveyed.5 The whole shambles could not have been better scripted to turn Labour’s hitherto biggest asset, the party’s close relations with the unions, into its greatest liability and deliver the Conservatives an irresistible mandate for tougher action against the unions than Mrs Thatcher had previously dared contemplate.

  Yet she was initially hesitant in gathering this electoral windfall. Public opinion was the key. Mrs Thatcher was still determined not to commit herself to any confrontation with the unions without first making sure that the public would be on her side. She was convinced that the great majority of decent trade unionists wanted only to be allowed to work for a fair wage without being bullied by politically motivated militants. But to win their support she must not seem to be spoiling for a fight. The critical test was the speech she was due to make when Parliament reassembled on 16 January, followed by a party political broadcast on television the next day.

  In the Commons she therefore offered the Government Tory support for three specific measures: a ban on secondary picketing, funding of strike ballots and no-strike agreements in essential services. There was never any likelihood that Callaghan would accept – he brushed her off with his usual weary assurance that it was all much more difficult than she imagined – but the offer gained her the patriotic high ground, particularly when she repeated it on television. The Government’s refusal left Mrs Thatcher free to assert that it was now up to the Tories to shoulder alone the responsibility of bringing the unions ‘back within the law’. ‘That’s the task which this government will not do, it’ll run away from it,’ she mocked. ‘I don’t shirk any of it. I shall do it.’6

  For the first time Mrs Thatcher had a clearly understood cause to which the long-suffering public now emphatically responded. The polls which at the beginning of the year had still shown the Tories neck and neck with Labour, or even a few points behind, now gave them a twenty point lead, while Mrs Thatcher’s personal rating had leapt to 48 per cent. The various disputes were eventually settled, on terms mostly around 9 per cent, and life returned to something like normal. But the legacy of bitterness remained. It seemed that nothing could now stop the Tories winning the election, whenever it was held.

  Callaghan could still have tried to hang on until the autumn in the hope that the memory of the winter’s humiliation would gradually fade, but his heart was not in it. The issue which finally precipitated the Government’s demise was devolution. On 1 March the Welsh and Scottish people were finally given the chance to vote on Labour’s proposals for assemblies in Cardiff and Edinburgh. On turnouts which suggested a profound lack of interest, the Welsh overwhelmingly rejected their proposed talking-shop (by a margin of 8 – 1), while the Scots voted in favour of an Edinburgh parliament by a margin too small to meet the condition written into the Bill by dissident Labour backbenchers. The Scottish result left the Scottish National Party with no reason to continue to support the Government (except that, had they considered the alternative, they were even less likely to get a Scottish parliament from Mrs Thatcher). For the first time the parliamentary arithmetic gave the Tories a real chance of bringing the Government down. On 28 March, therefore, Mrs Thatcher tabled yet another vote of confidence.

  There was still no certainty that it would succeed, even when the SNP, the Liberals and most of the Ulster Unionists declared their intention to vote against the Government. There were in that Parliament an exceptionally large number of small parties and maverick individuals: Labour still held a majority of 24 over the Conservatives, but the two main parties together accounted for only 592 MPs out of the total of 635. In the days before the vote the corridors and tearooms of the Palace of Westminster saw a frenzy of arm-twisting and bribery, bluff and double bluff. But by this time Callaghan saw no point in bartering his soul for a few more precarious weeks in office. He had already pencilled in 3 May for an election, whether he lost or won the crucial vote.7

  For her part Mrs Thatcher made it clear that she would do no deals with anyone. ‘In my heart of hearts’, she confessed in her memoirs, she thought the Government would probably survive.8 On the day of the confidence debate she made – as usual on these big occasions – a pedestrian speech indicting the Government on four charges: high taxation, centralisation of power, the abuse of union power and the substitution of ‘the rule of the mob for the rule of law’. ‘The only way to renew the authority of parliamentary government’, she concluded, ‘is to seek a fresh mandate from the people and to seek it quickly. We challenge the Government to do so before this day is through.’9

  It reads well enough, but it was heard ‘in complete silence’. Callaghan made a good debating speech twitting Mrs Thatcher for putting down her confidence motion only when she knew the Liberals and Scottish Nationalists were going to vote against the Government. ‘She had the courage of their convictions.’10 At the end of the debate Michael Foot wound up with a brilliant barnstorming performance; and then came the vote. Kenneth Baker best describes the scene:

  We returned to the Chamber looking rather crestfallen while the Labour benches looked very cheerful. Margaret was looking very dejected when suddenly Tony Berry, who had been counting in the Labour Lobby, appeared from behind the Speaker’s chair and held up his thumb.We couldn’t believe it. Spencer le Marchant holding the teller’s slip stepped up to the table and read out ‘Ayes 311 – Noes 310’…11

  Callaghan immediately announced that he would ask the Queen for a dissolution. The next day he announced that the General Election would be held on the same day as the local government elections on 3 May.

  Into battle

  Generally speaking, Mrs Thatcher was pretty confident, though she never liked to count her chickens: she had a superstitious nightmare that she might win the national election but lose her own seat in Finchley.12 Unlike many politicians, however, she thoroughly enjoyed electioneering, and after four years of frustration she threw herself into the contest – her ninth – with relish, knowing that it would either make or break her.

  The Tories’ electoral strategy had three strands – neutral, negative and positive. The first priority was to protect the Tory lead by keeping the campaign as dull as possible and allowing Mrs Thatcher to say nothing that might frighten the voters. The negative strand was to keep the heat on Labour, reminding the electors in simple language of the Government’s record since 1974: inflation (‘prices’), unemployment (‘jobs’), cuts in public services (schools, homes and hospitals) and above all the strikes and picket line violence of the winter. For a party wishing to present itself as the wind of change without being specific about the precise nature of that change, Mrs Thatcher’s gender was a godsend. The possibility of electing the first woman Prime Minister gave the Tory campaign a radical frisson, independent of anything she might say. If the country needed a new broom, who better to wield it than a brisk, no-nonsense woman? ‘Maggie’ – as she was now universally known – symbolised a fresh start before she even opened her mouth.

  Above all she shamelessly played up to her conviction that ‘they will turn to me because they believe a woman knows about prices’.13 She visited a supermarket in Halifax, bought four jars of instant coffee and a lump of cheese and discoursed knowledgeably about the prices of butter and tea, holding up two shopping bags, red and blue, to illustrate how much prices had risen under Labour. She repeatedly insisted that managing public expenditure was no different from running a household budget: the country, like every ordinary household, must live within its means. In Bristol she was presented with an outsize broom with which to sweep the country clean of socialism.

  Mrs Thatcher dominated the Conservative campaign. Ironically the next most promine
nt figure was Ted Heath, who threw himself into the election with a belated display of loyalty transparently intended to make it impossible for her to exclude him from her Government. He kept off the sensitive subject of incomes policy but spoke mainly about foreign affairs – practically the only candidate in the election to do so – and clearly had his eye on the Foreign Office. Pressed in every interview to say if she would include him, however, Mrs Thatcher firmly declined to name her Cabinet in advance.

  After the morning press conference she made flying sorties into the country, sometimes by air from Gatwick, sometimes in a specially equipped campaign ‘battlebus’, but almost always returning to London the same evening. The usual pattern was a factory visit or a walkabout in two or three key constituencies, an interview for regional television or local radio, followed by a big speech to a ticket-only rally of local Conservatives in the evening. Security was necessarily tight, following the murder of Airey Neave, blown up by an Irish car bomb two days after the election was declared, but the ticket-only rule – copied by Reece from his experience of Republican campaigning in the United States – reflected the Tories’ strategy of shielding Mrs Thatcher from the possibility of encountering hostile audiences or demonstrations: as far as possible she was shown only in controlled situations, speaking to rapturous congregations of the faithful.

  In fact she was warmly received wherever she went and enjoyed meeting real people when she could get to them through the mass of journalists and film crews. In Ipswich – against the advice of her handlers – she ‘braved a frightening crush of supporters to walk among the enthusiastic crowds’ and made ‘a short, confident, impromptu electioneering speech to a crowd of shoppers and passers-by… from the steps of the Town Hall’. ‘“It was like being on the hustings thirty years ago,” enthused one of her entourage.’14