The Iron Lady

by John Campbell

  But of course it was all for the benefit of the cameras. Mrs Thatcher, normally with Denis in tow, lent herself patiently to every sort of charade in order to get a good picture in the local paper or clip on the television news. In a Leicester clothing factory she took over a sewing machine and stitched the pocket on a blue overall. In Cadbury’s factory at Bourneville she operated a machine wrapping and packing chocolates. In Milton Keynes she and Denis had their heartbeats and blood pressure tested. ‘“Steady as a rock,” she declared triumphantly as the figures… flashed on the screen. “They can’t find anything wrong with me. They never can.”’When someone said that her heart and lungs would last till polling day, she shot back confidently, ‘Yes, and for the next twenty years in Downing Street.’ She took the chance to remind the press that she would be not only the first woman Prime Minister, but the first with a science degree, and ‘proceeded to deliver a brisk lecture on the system to monitor the temperature in containers at Tilbury’, talking about computers ‘with the same ease with which she had been discussing prices with shoppers’. Then she suddenly flashed a winning smile and said, ‘There – didn’t I learn my briefing well?’15

  Most famously, visiting a farm in Norfolk, she cradled a newborn calf in her arms. She held it for thirteen minutes, while the cameramen covered all the angles, until Denis warned that if she held it much longer they would have a dead calf on their hands. ‘It’s not for me – it’s for the photographers,’ she announced. ‘They are the really important people in this election.’16 ‘Would you like another take?’ she would ask them until they were happy.17 Callaghan was contemptuous of these vacuous photo-opportunities. ‘The voters don’t want to see you cuddling a calf,’ he told her. ‘They want to be sure you’re not selling them a pig in a poke.’18 Some journalists began to realise that they were being manipulated.Adam Raphael wrote an article in the Observer, ‘The Selling of Maggie’, criticising the way the Tory leader was being packaged in a series of cosy images, devoid of political content.19 But Gordon Reece knew exactly what he was doing. The press were offered seats on the Thatcher battlebus for £600 per head, and took them gratefully. In future elections they would grow more cynical. In 1979 they were still happy to print what they were fed.

  The only serious interrogation she faced was on television and radio. Even Reece could not deny the heavyweight media their chance entirely. But Mrs Thatcher accepted only one major television interview and two audience question-and-answer sessions during the campaign, plus two radio interviews and a phone-in. Contrary to Labour hopes that she would crack under the strain of a long campaign she made no serious blunders.

  As the three-week campaign progressed the Tory lead in the polls was steadily cut back, from an average of around 11 per cent down to around 3 per cent, while Callaghan’s personal lead over Mrs Thatcher widened. The Liberals, as usual during elections, picked up support, leading to renewed speculation about a hung Parliament. Mrs Thatcher naturally insisted that she wanted and expected to win an overall Conservative majority, and vowed that she would do no deals with the Liberals or anyone else if she fell short. But from about the middle of the second week she began to sound more defensive, and sometimes a bit rattled. Her adviser Angus Maude asked speechwriter Ronald Millar to try to calm her down. ‘It’s urgent,’ Maude told him. ‘If she blows up at this stage it could blow the election.’ Ever resourceful, Millar came up with the slogan ‘Cool, calm – and elected’ and persuaded Mrs Thatcher to adopt it, telling her that of course she was perfectly calm, but it was important that she help to keep those around her calm. She fell for it.20

  ‘Hello, Maggie’

  After a quiet Saturday on home ground in Finchley and Enfield, publicly shrugging off the narrowing polls, her campaign moved into top gear over the last three days. First Harvey Thomas staged a spectacular rally of Conservative trade unionists at the Wembley Conference Centre on Sunday afternoon. This was her highlight of the whole campaign – ‘an inspiring sight’, she told Patricia Murray, ‘and one which I will never forget’.21 Mrs Thatcher entered the hall to the strains of Hello, Dolly, rewritten by Millar and recorded by Vince Hill:

  Hello, Maggie,

  Well, hello, Maggie,

  Now you’re really on the road to Number Ten…

  With this event, wrote the Daily Mail, ‘the barn-storming, star-studded traditions of American politics arrived in Britain’.22

  She spent the rest of that day working on her final TV broadcast which went out on Monday evening. She spoke solemnly for ten minutes direct to camera, stressing the need for a change of direction and her own deep sense of responsibility, promising – in a phrase she had already tried out several times during the campaign – that ‘Somewhere ahead lies greatness for our country again’.23

  On Sunday night, after recording her final broadcast, she shyly asked Ronnie Millar if he had by any chance thought of a few words that she might say on the steps of Downing Street if it should turn out that she needed them. At that stage he would not tell her what he had in mind.24 Three days later, at her last press conference, a journalist asked her about the G7 summit conference coming up in June. ‘I have got it in my diary,’ she replied crisply.25 There is no doubt that she was genuinely confident. ‘She looks more powerful’, Jean Rook noted in the Daily Express, ‘and her soaring ambition and huge mental span are beginning to show.’26 The final opinion polls all showed the Tories clearly ahead – the margins ranging from 2 per cent (Gallup) to 8 per cent (London Evening Standard ).

  The polling day headlines hailed her expected victory. ‘The Woman Who Can Save Britain’, trumpeted the Daily Mail; ‘Give The Girl A Chance’, urged the Daily Express; while the Sun, urging Labour supporters to ‘Vote Tory This Time – It’s The Only Way To Stop The Rot’, looked forward to ‘The First Day of the Rest of Our Lives’.27 Yet up to the last minute she was still nervous that it might all be snatched away. She talked anxiously during the day of Thomas Dewey, the American presidential candidate who had appeared to have the 1948 election for the White House sewn up before Harry Truman unexpectedly pipped him at the last.28 Jim Callaghan – a solid incumbent who had never expected to become Prime Minister but had turned out surprisingly popular – was not unlike Harry Truman.

  By the time Mrs Thatcher and Denis arrived at Barnet Town Hall for her own count just before midnight it was clear that she would be Prime Minister, with an adequate if not overwhelming majority, though she still made a point of not claiming victory until she had 318 seats. In the end the Conservatives won 339 seats to Labour’s 269, with the Liberals holding 11, the Scottish and Welsh Nationalists reduced to 2 each and the various Ulster parties 12, giving an overall majority of 43. Yet at just under 44 per cent her share of the total vote was the lowest winning share – apart from the two inconclusive elections of 1974 – since the war. (Heath in 1970 had won 46.4 per cent.)29 Her fear that she might lose her own constituency was, of course, groundless. When her result was declared at 2.25 a.m. she had doubled her majority to nearly 8,000:

  She arrived in triumph at Central Office around 4.00 a.m. still only admitting that she had moved from ‘cautiously optimistic’ to ‘optimistic’. She was punctilious in thanking all the party workers who had helped in the campaign. Eventually she beckoned Millar into a corridor. ‘I think it’s going to be all right,’ she said cautiously. Now would he tell her what she should say on the steps of Number Ten? Millar offered her the supposed prayer of St Francis of Assisi – it was actually a nineteenth-century invention – beginning ‘Where there is discord, may we bring harmony…’

  The lady rarely showed deep feelings but this… proved too much. Her eyes swam. She blew her nose. ‘I’ll need to learn it,’ she said at length. ‘Let’s find Alison and get her to type it.’30

  She returned home around 5.15 a.m. for a few hours’ sleep but was back at Central Office by 11.30 a.m. to hear the final results and await the call to the Palace. When the telephone rang it was not Buckingham Palace but Ted Heat
h, ringing to offer his congratulations. Mrs Thatcher did not go to the phone, but quietly asked an aide to thank him. Eventually, soon after three o’clock, the call came. After an audience with the Queen lasting forty-five minutes she arrived in Downing Street around four o’clock as Prime Minister.

  The words that Millar gave her to intone on the steps of Number Ten sounded uncharacteristically humble, consensual and conciliatory:

  Where there is discord, may we bring harmony;

  Where there is error, may we bring truth;

  Where there is doubt, may we bring faith;

  And where there is despair, may we bring hope.

  Actually the second and third lines bear a more didactic interpretation than anyone noticed at the time. Mrs Thatcher had no time for doubt or error: she was in the business of faith and truth. But for a woman with a reputation for plain speaking she had a remarkable gift for clothing harsh ideas in deceptively honeyed words.

  St Francis’s apocryphal prayer was not the only piety she uttered on the steps of Downing Street. She also seized the chance to pay tribute to Alfred Roberts.

  Well, of course, I just owe almost everything to my own father. I really do. He brought me up to believe all the things I do believe and they’re just the values on which I’ve fought the Election. And it’s passionately interesting to me that the things that I learned in a small town, in a very modest home, are just the things that I believe have won the Election. Gentlemen, you’re very kind. May I just go…31

  And so the grocer’s daughter entered Number Ten.

  10

  The Blessed Margaret

  ‘Where there is discord…’

  MARGARET Thatcher entered Downing Street on 4 May 1979 carrying an extraordinary weight of public expectation, curiosity, hope and apprehension. Her achievement in becoming the first female leader of a major Western democracy lent her an unprecedented novelty value. Even when she led in the polls there had remained a lingering doubt whether the British electorate, when it came to the point in the privacy of the voting booth, would really bring itself to vote for a woman Prime Minister. Conceding defeat, the outgoing James Callaghan made a point of acknowledging that ‘for a woman to occupy that office is a tremendous moment in this country’s history’.1 It represented, as a writer in the Guardian put it, ‘one small step for Margaret Thatcher, one giant stride for womankind’.2

  Yet Mrs Thatcher determinedly played down the feminist aspect of her victory. She always insisted that she did not think of herself as a woman, but simply as a politician with a job to do, the standard-bearer of certain principles, who happened to be female. Though in her thirty-year progress from Grantham via Oxford to Westminster and now Downing Street she had skilfully exploited her femininity for whatever advantages it could bring her, she had rarely presented herself as a pathfinder for her sex and did not intend to start now. It was symptomatic of her uniqueness that the 1979 election saw fewer women returned than at any election since 1951 – just nineteen compared with twenty-seven in the previous Parliament. ‘It never occurred to me that I was a woman Prime Minister,’ she claimed in her televised memoirs.3 She preferred to boast of being the first scientist to reach the office.

  More important than the novelty of her gender was the widespread sense that she represented a political new dawn and a decisive break with the recent past. Of course no one in 1979 imagined that she would remain Prime Minister for eleven years, stamping her personality and even her name indelibly on the whole of the next decade. But she was unquestionably different. Her admirers – who included, crucially, many former Labour voters – saw her election as the last chance for a failing country to pull itself out of the spiral of terminal decline. Others – including many in her own party – feared that on the contrary she was a narrow-minded dogmatist whose simple-minded remedies would prove disastrous if she was not restrained by wiser counsel. In between, of course, there were plenty of cynics who were confident that she would in practice turn out no different from any of her recent predecessors whose lofty rhetoric had quickly turned to dust. With all her brave talk of restoring Britain’s ‘greatness’ – whatever that meant – by reviving the spirit of enterprise, Mrs Thatcher had been remarkably unspecific in opposition about how she was going to do it. Why then should she be expected to succeed where they had failed?

  Mrs Thatcher herself was fiercely determined that her government would indeed be different. She was driven by a burning sense of patriotic mission and historic destiny. ‘I can’t bear Britain in decline. I just can’t,’ she insisted during the election.4 ‘I know that I can save this country and that no one else can’, the Earl of Chatham is supposed to have declared on taking office in the middle of the Seven Years War in 1757. ‘It would have been presumptuous of me to have compared myself with Chatham,’ Lady Thatcher wrote in her memoirs. ‘But if I am honest I must admit that my exhilaration came from a similar inner conviction.’5

  Of course this was written many years later. But from the moment she walked through the door of Number Ten her officials felt the force of this passionate self-belief. Kenneth Stowe, her first principal private secretary, recalls that from the first moment she was ‘absolutely focused, absolutely committed’ and ‘very hands-on’: she wanted to be briefed about everything and to take charge of everything immediately, even before she sat down to pick her Cabinet. The contrast with the relaxed style of her predecessor could not have been more marked.6 Mrs Thatcher appeared to need no sleep, nor did she expect anyone else to need it. All her life, and specifically for the past four years, she had been training herself for this moment. ‘I have always had an onerous timetable, but I like it,’ she told an interviewer on the first anniversary of her taking office. ‘I have a tremendous amount of energy and for the first time in my life it is fully used.’7

  Yet her missionary impatience was, as always, overlaid with caution. She knew in broad terms what she wanted to achieve. She knew there was a tide to seize, a powerful movement of economic thinking in favour of the New Right free-market agenda that she and Keith Joseph had been preaching for the past four years. But at the same time she knew that the opposition of established interests and entrenched assumptions – in Whitehall, in the country and not least in the Tory party – was still very strong, so that she would have to proceed carefully in order to carry the party and the country with her. The election had delivered her an adequate parliamentary majority of forty-three. But the outstanding feature of the result, emphasised by all the press, was the imbalance between the prosperous Tory south of England and the struggling old industrial areas of the north of England, Wales and Scotland, which had still predominantly voted Labour.

  She frequently remarked that she would be given only one chance to get it right and she did not intend to blow it. In making her first pronouncements, therefore, in choosing her Cabinet, in taking over the machinery of government and in setting out her initial agenda, she was a great deal more cautious than her rhetoric in opposition had suggested, disappointing her keenest supporters while reassuring those who had feared she might be dangerously headstrong. The heroic picture painted in her memoirs of a radical reformer determined to shake the country from its socialistic torpor is not untrue; but her radicalism was in practice tempered by a shrewd awareness of political reality and a streak of genuine humility. She had no illusions about the scale of the task before her.

  Her long-term ambition, as set out in opposition, was nothing less than the elimination of what she called ‘socialism’ from British politics, the reversal of the whole collectivising trend of the post-war era and thereby, she believed, the moral reinvigoration of the nation. ‘Economics is the method’, she declared in 1981. ‘The object is to change the soul.’8 In the short term, however, she was determined to keep her attention firmly on the method. She would not be distracted by foreign affairs; she had no interest in flashy constitutional reform; nor did she have any immediate plans for tackling the welfare state. Even the reform of trade-union law
– for which she had an undoubted popular mandate – was not to be rushed. Hence for the leader of a determinedly radical government she had a remarkably thin agenda of specific reforms in May 1979. In opposition since 1975 she had deliberately stuck to general principles and avoided precise commitments. Her fundamental philosophy of anti-socialist economics prescribed a number of broad objectives: the Government should cut public spending, cut taxes, keep tight control of the money supply, refrain from detailed intervention in the economy and generally trust the operation of the free market. But very little of this required legislation. Most of it simply involved not doing things which previous governments of both parties had believed it their function to do.

  She had three important factors working in her favour. First, she gained a huge advantage from the timing of the election which had brought her to power. Had the Labour Government fallen at any time in the previous four years, Mrs Thatcher would have been obliged to launch her free-market experiment in far less propitious conditions. But the trade-union-orchestrated chaos of the previous winter had played into her hands. In the ten years since 1969, the unions had destroyed the Wilson, Heath and now the Callaghan Governments. Public tolerance of the assumption that the country could only be governed with the consent of the unions – the conventional wisdom of the past four decades – had finally snapped. There was a powerful mood that it was time for someone to make a stand and face them down; and that someone was Margaret Thatcher.