With a dearth of new policies to unveil, Central Office was preparing to fight the coming election on the perennial appeal of Tory Governments seeking re-election: ‘Life’s better with the Conservatives, don’t let Labour ruin it.’ In 1983 the claim was rather that life was getting better under the Conservatives. It was admitted that the country had been through a tough three years, but the rewards were now becoming clear: inflation and interest rates were coming down, economic activity was picking up and unemployment – the Government’s Achilles heel – would soon begin to fall as prosperity returned. The warning was the same, however: the return of a Labour Government would throw away all the hard-won gains.
A bland manifesto, giving no hostages to fortune, was all that was needed to win the election. The opposition parties – divided, poorly led and easily dismissed as respectively extreme (Labour) and woolly (the SDP-Liberal Alliance) – offered no serious challenge to Mrs Thatcher’s inevitable return. Yet the failure to put forward a positive programme for its second term, besides being democratically dishonest, left the Government directionless after the election, prey to untoward events for which it tried to compensate, as the next contest approached, with hasty initiatives.
The trouble was that Labour offered too easy a target. Even after the defection of the SDP in 1981, the party was still riven by a bitter civil war.The hard left had seized control of the party’s internal arrangements – the mechanism for electing the leader, the selection of candidates and the formation of policy. Yet senior social democrats like Denis Healey, Roy Hattersley and Gerald Kaufman remained in the Shadow Cabinet, visibly unhappy but helpless to arrest the leftward slide. In Michael Foot the party was stuck with an elderly leader, elected in a vain effort to preserve unity, whom the electorate found it impossible to imagine as Prime Minister: his approval rating – rarely over 20 per cent – was consistently the lowest since polling began. Moreover, as the election approached, Labour saddled itself with an entire platform of unpopular left-wing policies, any one of which might have rendered the party unelectable: wholesale nationalisation, massive public spending, the restoration of trade-union privileges, withdrawal from Europe and unilateral nuclear disarmament. If the Tories’ manifesto was vague, Labour’s was appallingly specific: Gerald Kaufman famously dubbed it ‘the longest suicide note in history’.16 Of all its suicidal policies the most crippling handicap was Foot’s passionate commitment to unilateral nuclear disarmament.
Not for half a century had the major parties been so far apart on the issue of national defence. Ever since 1945 a broad consensus had obtained between the two front benches on the question of nuclear weapons. The left had kept up a more or less constant agitation for unilateral disarmament; but successive Labour leaders had maintained a firm line on the retention of the British independent deterrent. Now, with the election of a lifelong unilateralist to the leadership coinciding with a revival of support for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, that consensus was ended. For the first time, nuclear weapons were set to be a major issue at the coming General Election. In the triumphant afterglow of her Falklands victory nothing could have suited Mrs Thatcher better.
Ever since becoming Tory leader in 1975, she had taken a strong line on the need to maintain and modernise NATO’s nuclear defences against the Soviet nuclear threat. Her blunt warnings about Soviet expansionism had led the Russian press to christen her ‘the Iron Lady’, and she wore the intended insult with defiant pride. She had no interest in the polite bromides of ‘peaceful coexistence’ with Communism but believed that the West was engaged in a life-or-death struggle with the Soviet Empire – a struggle which she confidently expected the West to win, though she did not foresee the timescale. As early as May 1980, in a newspaper interview on the first anniversary of her election, she was looking forward to the fall of Communism. ‘The major challenge to the Communist creed is coming now,’ she told The Times:
For years they were saying the march of communism and socialism is inevitable. Not now, not now. I would say that in the end the demise of the communist creed is inevitable, because it is not a creed for human beings with spirit who wish to live their own lives under the rule of law.17
In the Commons she promised to wage ‘the ideological struggle… as hard as I can’.18
That meant imposing sanctions following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and trying to persuade British athletes to boycott the Moscow Olympics. It meant supporting the struggle of the Polish Solidarity movement, which began in 1981, and keeping up the pressure over Soviet treatment of dissidents in breach of the Helsinki undertakings on human rights. It meant increasing Britain’s contribution to NATO military spending by 3 per cent, as she had promised in opposition. Above all, it meant firmly rejecting the siren call of nuclear disarmament and matching the Russians’ nuclear deployment missile for missile.
When the Conservatives came into office they were faced almost immediately with the need for a decision – which Labour had postponed – on replacing Britain’s obsolescent nuclear deterrent, Polaris. As is the way with nuclear decisions in every government, this one was confined to a small ad hoc subcommittee composed of the Prime Minister, her deputy, the Foreign and Defence Secretaries and the Chancellor.19 They lost no time in opting to buy the American submarine-launched Trident system, at a cost of £5 billion spread over ten years. The problem was that the expenditure could only be afforded by making cuts elsewhere. Mrs Thatcher, however, had no doubts. She believed passionately in nuclear weapons, both as a positively good thing in themselves, which had kept the peace in Europe for thirty years and would continue to do so as long as the balance of deterrence was preserved, but still more as an emblem of national power, prestige and independence. She never had any truck with the criticism that Britain’s ‘independent’ deterrent was in practice wholly dependent on the Americans for spares and maintenance and would never in any conceivable military circumstances be used without American consent. The decision to buy Trident, she told the Commons in July 1980, ‘leaves us master of our own destiny… We are resolved to defend our freedom.’20
But then the Americans changed the arithmetic by developing a new, more sophisticated version of Trident. In January 1982 the Government had to decide all over again whether to buy the upgraded D5 model in place of the original C4, at still greater expense. Mrs Thatcher was worried, but she was still determined that Britain must have the best and latest system, whatever it cost. This time she deployed the full Cabinet to outnumber the doubters. She also drew on her special relationship with President Reagan to persuade him to let Britain buy the D5 on exceptionally favourable terms, assuring the Commons – like a housewife in a soap-powder commercial – that ‘the expenditure of this money secures a far greater degree of deterrence than expenditure of the same amount of money on ordinary conventional armaments’.21
Mrs Thatcher was also eager to accept the deployment of American cruise missiles at military bases in Britain as part of NATO’s response to Soviet SS-20s targeted on the West. The deployment of cruise in several European countries had first been proposed by the West German Chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, as a way of locking the Americans into the defence of Europe at a time when it was feared they might otherwise walk away. Mrs Thatcher strongly supported it, not only to keep the Americans committed but also to demonstrate Europe’s willingness to share the burden of its own defence. She was witheringly scornful when the Germans and other European governments began to weaken in the face of anti-nuclear protests; but at the same time she relished the opportunity to demonstrate once again that Britain was America’s only reliable ally. When Britain agreed in September 1979 to station 144 cruise missiles at Greenham Common in Berkshire and RAF Molesworth in Cam-bridgeshire, the announcement caused little stir. But over the next three years, as the time for deployment approached, the mood changed. Increased tension between the superpowers, the spectre of a new nuclear arms race and the West’s rejection of several plausible-sounding Soviet disarmament offers
fuelled a Europe-wide revival of the fear of nuclear war, fanned by a widespread perception of Ronald Reagan as a sort of trigger-happy cowboy who might be tempted to use nuclear weapons against what he called (in March 1983) ‘the evil empire’.22 In Britain the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), dormant since the early 1960s, suddenly sprang back to life, drawing large numbers to marches, rallies and demonstrations. Moreover, its cause was now backed by the official opposition.
Mrs Thatcher welcomed a fight on the issue, first because she thought defence more fundamental even than economics; second because she believed that unilateral disarmament was absolutely wrong in principle and would make nuclear war more likely, not less; and third because she was confident that the country agreed with her. Opinion polls reflected public anxiety about specific weapons systems. Yet when it came to the point the public overwhelmingly wanted to retain Britain’s independent nuclear capacity. Keeping the bomb was at bottom, for the electorate as for Mrs Thatcher, a matter of national pride and identity. She was scornful of the woolly-minded wishful thinking of those who imagined that the USSR would respond in kind if the West tamely dismantled its weapons. ‘Any policy of unilateral disarmament,’ she told the Commons in June 1980, ‘is a policy of unilateral surrender.’23 The Warsaw Pact currently possessed a 3 – 1 superiority over NATO in nuclear weapons in Europe, she pointed out in July. ‘Those who seek to have a nuclear-free Europe would do well to address their efforts in the first place to Soviet Russia.’24 So long as the Soviets enjoyed superiority she scorned Brezhnev’s offer of a moratorium. She was all for disarmament, but only on a basis of equality. In the meantime, she insisted in November 1982, ‘We should have every bit as much strategic nuclear weaponry at our disposal as the Soviet Union, every bit as much intermediate nuclear weaponry at our disposal as the Soviet union.’25
Her enthusiasm for the latest hardware sounded alarmingly aggressive to those worried about the threat of nuclear escalation. The next time she spoke in the House about deploying cruise she was greeted with cries of ‘Warmonger’.26 Her response to this allegation was to insist repeatedly that nuclear weapons did not cause war but were actually the surest way to prevent it. She gave her fullest exposition of this argument at that year’s party conference, when she devoted a long section of her televised speech to spelling out the ABC of deterrence:
I understand the feelings of the unilateralists. I understand the anxieties of parents with children growing up in the nuclear age. But the fundamental question for all of us is whether unilateral nuclear disarmament would make a war less likely. I have to tell you that it would not. It would make war more likely…
Because Russia and the West know that there can be no victory in nuclear war, for thirty-seven years we have kept the peace in Europe… That is why we need nuclear weapons, because having them makes peace more secure.27
It was at a joint press conference with Helmut Kohl at the end of the Chancellor’s visit to London in February 1983 that she found the phrase that encapsulated her paradoxical faith. ‘We really are a true peace movement ourselves,’ she claimed, ‘and we are the true disarmers, in that we stand for all-sided disarmament, but on a basis of balance.’28 She always loved stealing Labour’s slogans for herself. ‘We are the true peace movement’ became her favourite refrain throughout the General Election and beyond.29
Realising that defence, and the nuclear argument in particular, was going to be a key battleground in the coming contest, Mrs Thatcher took the opportunity of John Nott’s intention to leave politics by removing him from the Ministry of Defence in January 1983 and replacing him with the much more combative figure of Michael Heseltine. Much as she distrusted Heseltine, she recognised that he had the populist flair to tackle CND head on. This was one of her most successful appointments; Heseltine responded exactly as she had hoped in the months leading up to the election, energetically countering the unilateralists in the television studios and on the radio. His most successful coup was to upstage CND’s Easter demonstration, when they had planned to form a human chain around the Greenham Common airbase on Good Friday. Heseltine stole their thunder by visiting Germany the day before and having himself photographed looking over the Berlin Wall, thus dramatising the enemy whom NATO’s nuclear weapons were intended to deter. Even with all its other doctrinal baggage, unilateralism was the biggest millstone round the Labour party’s neck, and Heseltine made the most of it. The contrast with the recapture of the Falklands did not need spelling out.
Landslide: June 1983
If the result of the election was never in much doubt, its timing was uncertain up to the last moment. All Mrs Thatcher’s habitual caution inclined her to carry on until the autumn. But she was under strong pressure from the party managers to go as soon as possible after the new electoral register came into force in February 1983: the redrawn constituency boundaries were expected to yield the Tories an extra thirty seats.The party chairman, Cecil Parkinson, and Central Office wanted to go early, and the temptation was great.
Nevertheless she sought every excuse for indecision. First she argued that she had promised President Reagan that she would attend the G7 summit at Williamsburg, Virginia, at the end of May: this would entail her being out of the country at a crucial stage of the campaign. She was persuaded that her absence could be turned to electoral advantage, with media coverage underlining her stature as an international stateswoman. Then she worried that the manifesto was not ready. Parkinson told her that it could be made ready in a couple of hours, at which she immediately started rewriting it herself. Still she wanted to sleep on the decision. But the next morning she went to the Palace as arranged. Polling day was set for Thursday 9 June.
The Tory campaign was frankly concentrated on Mrs Thatcher, highlighting her strength and resolution, clear convictions and strong leadership. The contrast with Foot was so obvious that it scarcely needed pointing out. Each day the Prime Minister herself chaired the morning press conference at Central Office, flanked by two or three colleagues; most of the Cabinet was paraded, but few featured more than once, and their role was clearly subordinate. Mrs Thatcher answered most of the questions. Besides herself only three ministers appeared in the party’s television broadcasts.
The campaign closely followed the successful pattern of 1979. After the press conference each morning she set off by plane or helicopter for whistle-stop visits around the country, meeting up with her campaign coach to inspect shiny new factories or do walkabouts in shopping malls, carefully chosen to provide good pictures for the local media and the national TV news; she went mainly to Tory constituencies, where only the local members were told in advance that she was coming, to ensure that she met an enthusiastic reception and to minimise the risk of hostile demonstrations. She made only a handful of major speeches – and those were delivered to carefully vetted audiences of Tory supporters well supplied with Union Jacks. In addition, she gave two interviews to friendly newspapers, did two major radio interviews and five major TV interviews – two taking audience questions and three with heavyweight interviewers.
Each evening when she came back to Downing Street she would have a quick supper and then get on with preparing speeches for the following day. Mrs Thatcher would rewrite and correct them far into the night. Next morning she would arrive at Central Office at 8.15 for an hour’s briefing before the 9.30 press conference. Gordon Reece attended these briefings and also helped rehearse her for her television appearances. But above all in this election she put herself in the hands of Cecil Parkinson, who had the knack of soothing tensions and keeping her calm when things went wrong. She trusted him completely. ‘If Cecil says not to do it,’ she said after one mix-up on the bus when she had wanted to change plans, ‘we won’t do it.’30 When it was all over she was generous in giving him the credit for victory.
Throughout the campaign she offered little that was new or positive, but concentrated on attacking Labour relentlessly on what she called ‘the gut issues’ – nationalisation, indu
strial relations and, above all, defence.31 Characteristically she covered her own weakest flank – unemployment – by counter-attacking Labour’s record in the 1970s. ‘In the end Labour always runs away,’ she jeered in her adoption speech at Finchley on 19 May:
They are running away from the need to defend their country… They are fleeing from the long overdue reform of the trade unions… They are running out on Europe… Above all, Labour is running away from the true challenge of unemployment.
Promising to create millions of jobs, she insisted, was ‘no more than an evasion of the real problem’. Real jobs could only be created by gradually building up a competitive economy with profitable industries that could hold their own in world markets. ‘We Conservatives believe in working with the grain of human nature, in encouraging people by incentives, not in over-regulating them by too many controls.’ ‘A quick cure,’ she repeated several times in another favourite formulation, ‘is a quack cure.’32
The Tories’ only other weak point was the widespread belief that the Government had a secret agenda to ‘privatise’ or somehow dismantle the National Health Service. Mrs Thatcher had already declared repeatedly that the NHS was ‘safe with us’; but she had to go on repeating it until she finally rebutted it with the strongest disclaimer at her disposal: ‘I have no more intention of dismantling the National Health Service,’ she declared at Edinburgh, ‘than I have of dismantling Britain’s defences.’33
The Iron Lady Page 29